Hong Kong’s coolest designer invades New York
QUICK: IF SOMEONE SAYS “Chinese fashion,” what do you think of? A Mao suit? A pair of plastic sandals? Well, the multimillionaire David Tang is out to change your mind. In his hometown of Hong Kong, Tang has reinvented modern Chinese chic, blending the stylish decadence of Shanghai in the 1930s with a cheery sendup of socialism in the 1960s, all of it marketed in ultrahip ’90s mode. The merchandise–fashion and home accessories–in his Hong Kong store, Shanghai Tang, is elegant and irreverent at the same time: linen tablecloths are embroidered with little Chinese coolies; traditional cheongsams, slit high up the leg, come in wildly untraditional neon colors. And for his spokesmodel, Tang landed the gorgeous Gong Li, the biggest movie star in China. Shanghai Tang is so successful it reportedly brought in $18 million in revenues in its first year, 1994, and still enjoys profit margins of 60 percent.
Now Tang is out to storm New York. To open his new Madison Avenue emporium in late November, he plans a three-day gala launch, complete with lion dancers and Peking Opera singers, parties, a premiEre of Wayne Wang’s new movie and a who’s who of Chinese luminaries rubbing elbows with New York’s fashion elite. “Don’t expect Chinatown,” says Tang, 43, brandishing his trademark Cohiba cigar. “This will be very avant-garde.”
High-end Asian style is already catching on in New York. Chinese designers such as Vivienne Tam and Anna Sui are already hot properties on the fashion circuit. Restaurants serving Asian cuisine, such as Nobu and Omen, are attracting the city’s high fliers, from supermodels to Wall Street hotshots. “People are bored to death with minimalism,” says David Wolfe, a fashion trend-spotter at the Doneger Group. “Asian design has always been about color and the ornate details on the clothes.”
Theatrical and brash, Tang is used to the role of cultural comprador. His grandfather was a wealthy bus-company owner and philanthropist who wanted little David to have the right pedigree. Tang was sent to school in England at 14 and picked up an upper-crust British accent. A fixture in British high society, he’s affectionately known in the jet set as “Tango.” In a recent interview, the usually exuberant Tang was stunned by the death of Princess Diana, his good friend. They spoke by phone the day before she died, to discuss her appear- ance at a cancer fund-raiser in Hong Kong later this month.
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