Fashion Maelstrom
The East Village is always a good place to find cute little boutiques with one-of-a-kind apparel. One hidden gem is Sohung Designs, a store on Ninth Street and Second Avenue that opened in September 2008.
The East Village is always a good place to find cute little boutiques with one-of-a-kind apparel. One hidden gem is Sohung Designs, a store on Ninth Street and Second Avenue that opened in September 2008.
The store carries clothes and accessories by seven designers, but only one of them is named Sohung Tong, a 36-year-old designer who launched his eponymous label in 2001, and later opened the Sohung Designs boutique with other designers whom he worked with previously in Edge NY NoHo on Bleecker Street.
Being a fashion designer wasn’t always Tong’s dream. In fact, he had planned on becoming a painter when he moved from Hong Kong to New York in 1991. He began working in different garment factories, where he learned, literally, how to sew buttons onto pieces of clothing. It was among these painstaking stitches that Tong realized his aspiration laid not with paintbrushes and canvases, but with needles, threads, and fabrics.
“Fashion is an art form, just a different way to do art,” he said.
A Parsons graduate, Tong distinguishes his clothes with crazy whorls of heavy zippers and conceives intricate ruched dresses. Most of them are black, the favorite color of all New York designers, and also the best-selling color, Tong said. There are silk tops with bold summery stripes that seem perfect for a beach getaway as well as long evening gowns that are exquisitely designed and crafted. Tong’s signature, the striking silver zipper spirals, crawls all over sweatshirts (for men) and ponchos (for women). There also is one raven wool coat with leaf-like pieces of cloth draped all over, which might very likely turn the coat wearer into a romantic and trendy nomad.
Contrary to his funky and edgy garments, Tong himself is very reserved and quiet. When asked what part of his multicultural background influenced his designs the most, he sheepishly laughed, “I don’t know.” It is an interesting contrast between a designer and his work — for someone whose clothes are so powerful and in-your-face, he is actually shy and timid, as if all he has to say, his clothes say it for him.
Tong draws inspiration from British and Japanese fashion icons, such as Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, and Yohji Yamamoto. But mainly, his muse is the fabric.
“When I get the fabric, I usually like to drape it on the mannequin, so you don’t know how it’s going to come out,” Tong said. “It’s always the last minute [that you] see how the fabric comes out.”
As a New York-based designer, Tong actually pays no attention to fellow couturiers.
“Sometimes if you want to follow the trend, you need to see what other designers are doing, you’re going to follow…then you’ll create something similar to theirs,” he said. “But I don’t follow the trend. I like different stuff, different ideas.”
Apparently, for someone like Tong who does his own thing and tries to stay out of the mainstream, the recession hits, but not too hard.
“… We usually depend more on the tourists. I have a tourist customer from London. We have tourist customers from different areas,” Tong said. “Usually when they come back to New York, they would come looking for me.”
The Europeans love Sohung Designs, and next time when they travel to New York, they will find that Tong’s next collection, fall/winter 2009, is entirely different from what he’s done before — he is forsaking the usual zippers, and embracing a new element, buttons. He’s also getting ready for his debut at the Queens Fashion Week in Long Island City this coming fall. Like the designer said, “I want my stuff to be more forward,” not just in an aesthetic sense, but also in his career path. Sohung Designs is moving ahead, and it will very likely be a good second half of year 2009 for Tong.
(Photo credit: Sohung Designs)
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