Lisa Von Tang

New York Fashion Week: Strip For Autumn/Winter

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If some shows of the just-concluded New York Fashion Week is any real indication, it’d be an autumn/winter 2022 season of clothes that are really scraps of fabric on the body

Seasons change; so too fashion. But it’s increasingly hard to tell the seasons apart if we go by what is shown on the New York runways recently. Even the fashion: swimwear or dress? Or, bandages? This has been New York Fashion Week, not Los Angeles, not Miami. The average low of the Big Apple’s winter temperatures is minus-10 degrees Celsius. Yet, for autumn/winter 2022, a considerable number of American designers seemed to have Mogadeshu in mind, not Manhattan. There is no denying that fabric prices are rising (check: cotton, especially organic), so using considerably less might be a strategy to push cost (although not retail prices) down, but if fashion’s main premise is the use and manipulation of cloth to cover the body, does it make sense that less is positively more, unclothed is attractively dressed?

With the biggies, namely Tom Ford and Marc Jacobs, missing in action this time, we were encouraged to look at the runways of other names, not necessarily within our usual radar. And the newbies—“New York Fashion Week Is All About Emerging Talent”, went the rousing WWD headline. We were, however, putting them aside for the noise generated by those deemed New York’s loudest and brightest—the extraordinary individuals who could make noise out of nothing. While there is the subtext of fashion’s relationship with race (now Black designers and Black aesthetic are to be even more celebrated), there is also America’s increasing partiality for the madcap (imprudent?) pulling together of looks that weaken the boundaries of refinement and discernment. Sportswear meets worse-for-wear, pseudo-prissy pairs with tryingly pretty, and utilitarian clichés mate with hoary hussy hacks.

In fact, the vivid pronouncement of sex, or sexiness that must replace loungewear-as-all-wear of the past two years is the dominant theme of this season in New York, from the debut of Lisa Von Tang to the strengthening of Telfar Clements to the comeback of Shayne Oliver. Sure, this close-to-nakedness shouldn’t be surprising when many designers made the bra a major trend for spring/summer 2022, but is stripping down really the way forward even when bare is not normally preferred to battle brrr? Where do we go—or how little more—from here? Or, have fabrics become so expensive that it is really more viable for some brands to use as little of them as possible? Rather than textile cost that impacts wholesale markup, there is this persuasive believe that the market for such clothes is ripe. Pioneers such as Nicki Minaj has been testing the legal limits of the lack of dress since 2017, but at the time, the adoption was mainly among celebrities and stars. Now, we are to believe that women in general hanker after the utterly skimpy too.

…there is also America’s increasing partiality for the madcap (imprudent?) pulling together of looks that weaken the boundaries of refinement and discernment

Near-nudity is not, of course, radical, anymore. We have gotten used to it. Social media made sure of that, the red carpets of the Grammys and Met Gala made sure of that, and the lost of nuances that once constituted sexy made sure of that. Or is this bare-is-beautiful the epitome of modern ease? When we looked at an Eckhaus Latta column, with a plunging neckline (to the navel), ‘cold hips’, side slits, we can’t help but wonder where construction and flattering went. To be sure, there are techniques involved in the assembling of these crisscrossed strips or the hanging of fabrics from a narrow point on the shoulders to barely cover the rest of the body. Change has arrived at how clothes are held together too. Could taping now take the place of sewing?

Some people say that the sex in clothes is not there unless you were looking for it. These are articles of fashion, not dresses for any gaze, male or female. Women are now so comfortable with their bodies that they are expanding the definition of a sexualised body. Self-esteem is boosted by self-sexualising? It is a complex world, and fashion, with all its increasingly mixed messages, is just as much about un-fashion: Why have more clothes when you can do away with a whole chunk of them (even for winter months)? Clothing has a different function from what many of us remember. Unclothed says about fashion design what space does for graphic design: it is an element. Bare skin in a no body-shaming world is lovelier to look at than the stitched fabric that once concealed it. Tom Ford—who’d guess?—now looks positively modest.

These clothes could be one of reasons why not that many people take New York Fashion Week seriously, especially when the output is increasingly looking like the getups at that event on the first Monday of May. American fashion has gone from user-friendly practicality to celebrity-targeted hotness, from Donna Karan’s Five Easy Pieces to just plain easy—free from the constraints of coverings. It is tempting to cast this as a new gen of designers having fun, communicating an inside joke, but the swaddles are serious stuff. The name to watch out for this season was Shayne Oliver, whose former label Hood by Air came to a halt in 2017. Mr Oliver returned with a fashion mishap called Headless, sending out a hotchpotch that set forth his embrace of the display of skin. So, there was that Viktor & Rolf-like shoulder, and a horizontally protracted version, as well as those odd shapes here and there that made every falling piece in Tetris look positively regular, but for the most part—those deconstructed bra tops!—are composites that considered not the sheathing of the body. Supporters eagerly tagged Mr Oliver’s scant semblance of clothes as “American avant garde”. Oh, sure, just like the rest of the bare brigade.

Runway photos: source. Collage: Just So

When Fashion Stops Living

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At the recent New York Fashion Week, Lisa Von Tang Dares to Die. Bravo?

Showing in the just-concluded New York Fashion Week, Lisa Von Tang (LVT) serves up her floozy looks at the right time. In the era of the pandemic, women, we have been told, are embracing sexy clothing as an “empowered choice”. This has nothing to do with effecting a sexual response in—well, to be woke—any sex. Women just want to look that way. And Ms Von Tang (aka Lisa Crosswhite, also Lisa Rosentreter, who formerly designed under Chi Chi Von Tang), is willing to wager that her body-hugging, cleavage-baring, navel-showing, rump-exposing, serpent-snaking fashion would find immense favour, especially in the Big Apple, where she is in the good company of like-minded designers Eckhaus Latta, LaQuan Smith, and Bronx and Banco. But, unlike the Americans, she is flashing skin under the gammy guise of Orientalism and, in doing so, ‘Dare(s) to Die’, as the 39-look collection is ominously called.

Whether that is defiance or a taunt, Ms Von Tang is clearly in a death-embracing mood. Hers is an admirable tenacity to milk Chinese motifs for all they’re worth, even when what she ends up with is mostly cheese. She has done it before (all the way back to her first store, now closed, in Scotts Square) and she’s still doing it. She is no Vivienne Tam, who has a pop sensibility, wrapped with cheeky irreverence, in the motifs chinois she employs. Ms Von Tang, who is half Chinese, has a more linear approach, sometimes mistakenly described by the media and her supporters as “authentic”. A dazzling snake has to slither down the body; its forked tongue flicked out. It can’t be placed in a more surprising manner. (We won’t attempt to understand that vulva-centred flame on a crotch! Or, is that empowered?) A slit is evocative of the qipao’s, but works like a rip. It rebuffs the Chinese belief that showing the whole knee is less alluring than a hint of the thigh. Pankou (盘扣) or frog fasteners are less decorative elements than to yield bondage effects; applied to the side of the bodice, they curiously make an outfit look constricted. “For soft, pure, spirits,” as she says on the LVT website, “who have had to deal with the brutality of the world”？

Ms Von Tang, to be sure, is proud of being half Chinese, and, according to her corporate profile, also with “Burmese, Thai and Indonesian blood in her ancient bloodline.” She, thus, wears Asia on her sleeve (LVT is an SG brand! And Ms Von Tang is a SG PR), but she tends to design from a Western standpoint, picking, as a Westerner would, those motifs considered “exotic”, forming a clichéd counterpoint to urban uniforms—such as a blouson—that she, at one time, made popular, one really modelled after the Japanese souvenir jacket. Whatever contemporary “twists” she attempts, they are tagged to the side of the hackneyed. It is, thus, tempting to compare the Mandarin-collared mini-dresses of the present collection to the archetypal Chinese restaurants’ waitress uniforms, but the effect rests somewhere between cringey costume and hooker chic that Saweetie would love.

Chineseness, it seems, is her calling card. She told the American media, “I want to do it in a way that doesn’t feel like Chinese New Year—a little more contemporary and modern”. She may have narrowly avoided CNY, but somehow the clothes have the vibe of Chinatown, not the one between South Bridge Road and New Bridge Road, but those theme-park manifestations in the hub cities of the West. “A little more contemporary and modern” is, therefore, not quite enough, even if they are tethered to the punkish, clubby, and ‘fierce’. Bodysuits unattached at the crotch (there’s also a super-abbreviated one!), OG (the store!)-worthy glittery leggings, skinny satin pants with criss-cross chains(?) across the stomach, bags-as-harnesses (part 1017 ALYX 9SM, part Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton?), and cheap-looking crystal danglies for straps and such have the whiff of the death of design savvy. It really might be a tad better if Lisa Von Tang dares to live.

Photos: Lisa Von Tang

Toon Town Tang

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Fashion is sometimes like a joke: there are good jokes and there are bad jokes. And, now and then, you don’t get the joke at all.  In line with the ‘Anime’ theme of the collection, Chi Chi Von Tang’s debut Singapore Fashion Week show opened with a video presentation of a purported sighting of a super vigilante—“an elusive powerful woman” that is “tall, slender, Asian, in her mid-thirties”. But this was not a motion-picture animation. Rather, it was an amateurish live-action “breaking news” flash that could have been one of the class assignments submitted at the Singapore Media Academy. As if all that was not enough, talents (the brand’s own staff, it was reported) acted out the scenes on the catwalk!

By now, we’re not left in the dark that the mysterious one-woman rescue mission is a Chi Chi Von Tang aka Lisa Von Tang aka Lisa Crosswhite. Ms Von Tang (for simplicity, will stick to this moniker) is a girl-powered go-getter of Chinese and Canadian descent, who has quietly worked on her Chi Chi Von Tang label about a year ago and came to some prominence when it was reported that one of her yet to-be-released pieces from the ‘Anime’ collection was seen on a guest at this year’s Met Gala to celebrate the opening of Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology.

That cute number—with manga, not anime, illustrations by Canadian-Chinese artist Liao Mujia for the skirt—was picked up by our local media and celebrated as some breakthrough. Suddenly Chi Chi Von Tang became a label to watch. And watched we did. The spirited show was opened by Ms Von Tang’s favourite Malaysian model, the Seremban native Tinie Bibbaby, who storm-twirled the runway with a fierceness worthy of a Chi Chi Warrior, as fervent followers of “Chi Chi fashion” are called. It’s all very Mother Monster and her Little Monsters, of course. Ms Bibbaby wore a sleeveless top emblazoned with the question “Who is Chi Chi Von Tang?” (the back should have read, “Who cares!”) and shorts over which a printed fabric was somehow fasten to the waist as an open-front skirt. So pleased Ms Bibbaby must have been with what she was given to wear that prior to the show, she posted a 14-plus-minute live feed of the backstage action on Facebook, declaring how she and fellow model Tuti Mohd Noor “make Malaysia proud”.

The opening number immediately left you feeling that this would be about styling rather than design. Chi Chi Von Tang has been described as a “street-luxe” label with what the brand says is a focus on “statement jackets”. The debut collection early this year was “inspired by Chinese couture (oxymoron or not, we leave it to you to decide) and the fire and swagger of Grace Jones (still firing and swaggering?)”. And where’s the street and the luxe and the Chinese-couture? It’s all exemplified by the Chi Chi Warrior Bomber—a flight jacket with frog buttons added to it and ethnic fabrics for sleeves. Should the exploration of Chinese or Asian motifs be this simplistic or reductive?

Lisa Von Tang’s ‘Anime’ collection stays close in spirit to what she has set out to do from the beginning. The designer, by her own admission, “does not come from a traditional design background” and Chi Chi Von Tang “celebrates unique spirits, courage and color”. On the narrow runway in the Auditorium Foyer of the National Gallery last night, there was the predictable pastiche of styles loosely held together by Oriental details such as frog buttons and fringes. Whether any of these can be considered unique really depends on one’s cultural standpoint. In Ms Von Tang’s case, it is a Western mind reconnecting with her Eastern roots, hence the potentially tacky amplification of Oriental exotica. Ms Von Tang even crossed into Priscilla Shunmugam’s territory by sending out her interpretation of a cheongsam, which looked like something Sun Ho might wear if she were still shaking her booty to stardom in LA.

The disparate world of fashion is full of brands that are born in an alternate universe, a colourful recess that does not tune into the aesthetic common denominator that connects the groundbreaking designers of worth. Chi Chi Von Tang’s ‘Anime’ collection seems to be from that other cosmos, where “street” is euphemism for not pursuing refinement. In fact, to us, it has the requisites that will prompt Tim Gunn to say, “Clothes do not exist to humiliate their owners. Please do not force garments into performing psychological tasks for which they were not designed!”

Singapore Fashion Week 2016 is staged at the National Gallery from 26 to 30 Oct