Almost a year ago to the day, Chen and I met in the lobby of Torontos Germain Hotel the day after she launched her Orange by Angela Chen label to great acclaim. On the eve of her fourth LG Fashion Week appearance, the Taiwan-born, Vancouver-based designer manages to fit me in for a brief conversation as she puts the finishing touches on her fall/winter 2011 collection, which will walk the runway at Torontos Heritage Court this Friday (Apr. 1) under a slightly different name: OR by Angela Chen.
The name was always OR, Chen explains. It was Orange, but that was OR and Ange for Angela. I wanted to go back to the original idea.
Asked what OR means to her, she says its an expression of choice this OR that. Its the idea of having another option. And it also means gold, she adds cheerily.
A graduate of the prestigious Parsons The New School of Design in New York, Chen honed her craft working with American fashion icons Marc Jacobs, Carolina Herrera and Anna Sui before returning to Vancouver to start her own line.
Her inaugural sortie on the catwalk last year showed a talented but safe designer who preferred a neutral palette and traditional silhouettes. What made the collection memorable were the touches of hand-knit extravagance Chen created to accessorize her collection. Perhaps realizing where her talents lay, or moving towards what was more appealing to her personal aesthetic, ORs latest collection is 90 per cent hand-knit by Chen herself, who spent long days in her studio counting stitches, making up her own patterns, and daydreaming. Most of the time when Im knitting something, Im thinking about the next piece I want to make, she says.
Inspired by the trademark line-and-squiggle work of contemporary artist Jonathan Lasker, Chen has incorporated the artists abstract expressionist canvases into a knitwear medium, thereby creating a completely separate work of art in the bargain.
To explain the process of interpreting Laskers two-dimensional work and translating it into a three-dimensional garment, Chen uses as an example one of the collections showstopping pieces, a bold black skirt constructed of layers of looped wool (pictured left).
In the painting that inspired me, Lasker used a big brush and he started drawing big, curly circles in one corner. I thought it was so beautiful next to the structured grids [in the rest of the painting]. Those same grids can be seen in other pieces, like a loosely-knit taupe dress (inset).
While not a copy by any means, the influence is as obvious as Chens singular vision.
