Feng Chen Wang’s runway, with its smattering of cartoonishly giant, plush household items—a telephone, refrigerator, and toilet, like something out of a Claes Oldenburg installation—set the stage for her decidedly conceptual and comfortable vision of menswear. For a second time, the Chinese designer touched down during New York men’s Fashion Week to show her impossible, artful conceits.
Where last season she emphasized her Chinese roots, this season she spoke to the notion of homecoming. Her home these days is split between Shanghai, London, and New York, so the provenance in question was her birthplace of Fujian, in southern China. “I wanted to play with the idea of going home,” she said in a pre-show walk-through, “and of always having your memories with you wherever you are in the world.” If some of the enormous padded coats and trenches resembled furnishings, that was the point, as were the tangles of circuitous seams and meandering tape. The number 239—her street address as a child—was appliquéd throughout and fashioned into 3-D bags.
One extreme look, a colossal pile of men’s shirting, as if picked up from the dry cleaner and tossed in a heap, was in fact her version of the boyfriend shirt, repeatedly borrowed and never returned. Other looks were draped in an exaggerated way or had other garments folded into them, a reference to hand-me-downs. They were accessorized with key-shaped jewelry and The Way Home sneaks, a collaboration with Air Jordan 1. Wang used color to similarly novel effect, with warm gold and peach hues evoking the sunset at the end of a day’s journey.
Comparisons to other creators of the avant persuasion, among them Rei Kawakubo and Walter Van Beirendonck, are inevitable. Like those artists, Wang appears happily preoccupied with concept over sex appeal. Her seduction lies more in the delineation of an idea, the rendering of an abstraction. It’s a nice point of departure in a week too often dominated by trend-driven messaging.
