Cheney Chan is blending traditional Chinese craft with modern couture, creating dazzling designs captivating Eastern and Western audiences; the rising fashion star gives us his take on dreaming big
He made his unofficial debut at Paris Haute Couture Fashion Week last June, but his growing social media presence – 5.5 million Douyin followers and counting – has already made Chan a popular influencer
It’s telling that Chan chose to use one of ancient China’s greatest inventions – a precious, delicate material made from the metamorphosis of silkworms – to create his own, marking the designer’s impressive evolution over the years and fully realising his transformative vision of fashion. Just as silk, woven into luxurious fabrics and traded along its namesake Silk Road, became the hottest new commodity on the block as early as two millennia ago, Chan is now one of mainland China’s most promising young exports – a home-grown talent making revolutionary breakthroughs in the East and West.
“When I talk with my followers, we just talk about how to make you more fashionable,” says Chan when we catch up at his recent trunk show with the Hong Kong Fashion Designers Association. “It’s easy to deal with ready-to-wear, how to cover your body, shape your body, something like that. But when I do couture work, I just be myself. I don’t need to talk with anyone else.”
As much a dreamer as he is a designer, Chan has larger-than-life ideas that often take shape subconsciously as he grounds himself in the design process – grasping with the grandiosity of his fantasies, so to speak, without losing his grip on reality. “For me, it’s [been] a long journey to do this,” says Chan, 32, who earned his stripes as a ready-to-wear designer for almost a decade before launching his couture-exclusive Cheney Chan Private label in 2021. “In the past, I didn’t do it well. When I designed a dress about, for example, porcelain, I only drew some patterns like qinghua qi [blue and white Chinese porcelain]. But it was not enough. It wasn’t contemporary enough.”
Feeling uninspired, Chan returned to the foundation of fashion and art in general – experimentation – to reach into the depths of his imagination and create something so profoundly vivid it could only be deemed an extension of the visionary’s world view. Following that train of thought led Chan to develop the principle of fengya qi, which translates roughly as “elegant porcelain” – a term the designer coined to describe not only his porcelain-like creations, but also his overall rebranding.
“Now when I think about porcelain, I make it myself,” he says of his trial-and-error approach. “I found something very funny – I’m not good at making porcelain, and it will fall down. It gave me many beautiful silhouettes.”