The second floor of the Georgia Room on Lexington Avenue was full on Friday afternoon for a show that had not happened before. Tang Chi Couture has a runway history, including a formal debut at London Fashion Week last September, but this was the label’s first solo New York runway: 25 looks, 3pm, a room packed tight enough that the front row and the photographers were sharing elbows.
The designer is Maggie Fan, born in Taiwan and based in New York. The brand says the New York debut was personal to her because this is the city where she built her design language. Every label says some version of that. What makes it land here is that the clothes are demonstrably made the hard way, by hand, in a category where most emerging names are cutting corners to get to volume.
The collection is called “In Between…” and it picks up where the last one left off. That collection was about time. This one asks what comes after. Fan frames it as the fragile distance between life and death, and the relationship between darkness and light, with love and mortality at the center: loving something until death, sacrificing yourself for it, or being drawn toward something dangerous, like a moth to a flame. The brand’s own summary is “quiet violence and deadly romance.”
On the runway that reads as construction rather than mood. The show opened with a structured white and black bodice over a full dark skirt, and kept returning to the same move: a rigid, sculptural top half against something that moves. There was pleating cut into blade shapes and finished with feathered edges, a sheer fringed skirt that hung like a curtain of rain, corsetry worked with metallic thread, and a pair of graphic black and white looks walked together late in the show. One of the strongest pieces had handwriting scrawled directly across the fabric, which is the closest the collection came to saying the theme out loud. It closed on a white satin gown, clean after twenty-odd minutes of texture.
The show also gave a wider release to the brand’s shoes, a category the label has been building quietly and now clearly wants to sell.
Credits, because a show this produced does not happen alone: hair by Aubrey Loots with Wella Professionals, makeup by The New York Makeup Academy, casting by Cano Castings, styling by Jungle Lin, set design by Jonathan Schatzberg, florals by Beyond the Rose Garden, music by Kudu Leon, technical direction and production by Yancy Trinidad and 3rd Space Productions, runway photography by Karla Tomanelli, and PR and production by L.E.R. Public Relations.
The FVM read: a first New York runway is the easiest place in fashion to overreach, and most emerging labels use it to prove they can fill a room. Fan used hers to show technique. Twenty-five looks is a lot to hold together for a label this size, and the ones that worked best were the ones where the concept stayed in the seams instead of being explained at the audience. That is a good problem to have at a debut.
Tang Chi Couture is at TangChiCouture.com and @TangChi_Couture on Instagram.
Images courtesy of Tang Chi Couture and L.E.R. Public Relations. Runway photography: Karla Tomanelli.
