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“It is about the balance between nature and humans—and between humans and clothing,” the designer Peng Tai says, attempting to describe the ethereal, almost ephemeral quality of his creations, a strangely affecting, oddly romantic collection he offered during Paris Fashion Week last month. Here are dresses meant for a dissolute Cinderella, a Sleeping Beauty awakened with a kiss, clad in an artfully tea-stained gauzy gown; frocks that owe their seductive appeal to asymmetrical ribbons and childlike embroideries and voluminous smocking.
“We produce everything ourselves,” Tai says in his showroom in the 11th arrondissment, which after Fashion Week will revert back to his live-work space, with three areas divided into sections for cutting, sewing, and dying and where a team of around 10 artisans will create the entire line. (There is a fourth spot for sleeping someplace too.)
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Tai grew up in Taiwan, graduated from the London College of Fashion, and has shaggy hair reminiscent of a 1960s British mod. He has been in business for around two and a half years and cites as his influences two elusive geniuses—Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and Martin Margiela. But you can also hear echoes of other designers in his work—of London’s Elena Dawson and Parisian Marc Le Bihan, who both specialize in the kind of shredded, rough-hewn chic that Tai embraces.
Tai insists that as other fashion behemoths get bigger and bigger, his commitment to staying small remains fierce. (Among the selected retail outlets where you can buy his things is Dover Street Market.) No two garments are exactly alike, yet you would expect variations in clothes that are not made on any assembly line but instead with a single person in charge of a whole garment. “That way you put emotion in it!” he says. “I love to communicate and share the same values.” These values include the power of Chinese medicine, which Tai takes so seriously he has sewn actual herbs into the hem of one dramatic dress.
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Asked if he would ever consider selling his creations online, he cries, “Never! Because we want to communicate with people!” But that doesn’t mean he isn’t ambitious in his own highly individualist way. Tai declares that he is embarking on a five-part, three-year-long aesthetic journey, with the clothes variously informed by metal this season, followed by wood, water, fire, and earth. “It’s the balance of yin and yang,” he says. Or, you could argue, the balance of glamour and dishabille, the dialectic of raw and refined. And speaking of keeping it small—a little rack in the corner of the atelier holds tiny garments of such charm that you melt want the sight. “For babies?” you ask, but Tai shakes his head. “No. Cats.”
