Taiwan Today

Fashion trends cαn change almost overnight, with super-short miniskirts all the rage one day, jeans and sneakers the next. But clothes designer Cheng Hui-chung has very different ideas.

Henry David Thoreau knew his own mind when it came to clothes. In Walden he wrote, “Let him who has work to do remember that the purpose of clothing is first, to hold the heat of the body, and sec­ondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness.” He had no time for those who slavishly followed every passing fad, chas­ing after whatever was new and paying more heed to the opinions of others than to considerations of utility.

Designer Cheng Hui-chung(鄭惠中) may not have read Walden, but he is nev­ertheless a disciple of the great American transcendentalist when it comes to cloth­ing. Cheng, 41, avoids mainstream trends. “Name-brand products are not necessarilybad,” he says. “Some of them are high­ quality and live up to their professional image. But fashion creates a Vanity Fair. People wear that stuff to show off—which makes some of them vain, and gives oth­ers an inferiority complex.” So he decided to make alternative clothes that would be what he describes as “fashion-resistant.”

Cheng studied textile design for five years at junior college. After graduating, he joined a leading textile company to work as a designer. In search of new ideas, he started borrowing textile collections from Chang Mu-yang(張木養), a folklore expert who owns a huge collection of Tai­wan aboriginal tribes' artifacts. He also started touring tribal areas to learn about their clothes-making techniques. “On these trips, I also made the acquaintance of several heavyweights in Taiwan's textile and clothing circles,” he says. “I met chairs of the textile and clothing departments of various colleges, I met folklorists and anthropologists. I learned from them. And I began to fall for clothes-making. It was as though I'd finally identified my lifetime's work.”

The textile company eventually pro­moted Cheng to be its quality-control man­ager. Unfortunately, however, his research trips to tribal areas took him away from the office so often that he eventually lost that job. Afterwards he worked briefly as a pro­ duction manager in a textile design center before starting his own management con­ suiting company, where his clients in­ cluded a number of textile factories and garment companies keen on establishing quality-control schemes. Then in 1985 he started his own clothing workshop.

Despite having held so many jobs, his ruling passion has always been clothes manufacture. “I've stayed in the loop, and with each job I've learned something, met people, and saved money,” he says. “That's what made it possible for me to start this small workshop—that and the support of my wife.” His wife, Yen Chen­ ping(顏鎮平), specializes in dyeing proc­esses. She runs the tailoring department, calling on a pool of freelance seamstresses to assist with stitching, seaming, and hem­mingo There is only one full-time employee, who helps with the dyeing.

The workshop makes clothes from scratch with minimal outside participation. Cheng designs the cloth he wants, paying special attention to texture, and then com­missions a factory to make it up to his specification. He also draws and creates patterns for the clothes he intends to make, functioning as a “designer” in the more tra­ditional sense. Husband and wife then work together on hand-dyeing the clothes and the specially ordered viscose-fiber buttons. “There are three aspects to clothes making: creating the material, shaping, and colors.” Cheng says. “Only full involvment—being able to play around with all three aspects—satisfies my experimental side.”

Cheng insists on using only natural fibers. He recognizes that advances in tex­tile technology are facilitating the manu­facture of more and more synthetic clothing materials, and he knows that many designers, always yearning for something new, are keen to try these trendy fabrics. But Cheng insists on maintaining a fabric's original properties: cotton is for keeping cool and dry, wool is for warmth. He is a school-trained textile professional who keeps himself up-to-date by reading specialty periodicals, so he is well aware of the tricks that new technology can per­form, but the workshop largely steers clear of them.

To take one example: Cheng believes that the wrinkle-free technology now be­ing adopted by many garment manufactur­ers can detract from the fabric's original qualities, because the acid-handling tech­niques used to produce a wrinkle-proof finish actually cause the moisture-absorb­ing rate of cotton to drop significantly. “Clothes are a person's second skin,” he says. “It's healthier to use materials that can breathe.”

Cheng started making garments that were inspired by tribal clothes, because that way he could experiment with the cloth-weaving and hand-dyeing tech­niques he had studied at first hand. But then he increasingly began to pay attention to the casual style of most tribal clothes, and his studies led him to the conviction that this was the only hope for innovation in dress. “The hardening of social stand­ards and conventions over time has meant that ways of thinking in developed socie­ties have become stiff and uniform,” he says, “whereas tribespeople, untouched by outside civilization, have a broader out­look on dress. They've got no set ideas about what an item of clothing should be like, and they wear their clothes in many different ways. They never bother with measurements. Their tailoring doesn't stick to the rules of symmetry.”

Cheng initially produced a line of hand-dyed clothes made from natural fabrics and designed in basic styles. For the first few years, he saw himself as an ambitious young entreprenuer, positioning his clothes as handicrafts and marketing them in galleries and craftshops. He also sold some of his products to the research departments of a couple of museums Cheng gave the workshop a fancy name, and had it printed on name cards. His prod­ucts all contained a specially designed label. He handled his business in an entre­preneurial style, carefully calculating each operation's cost-effectiveness and apply­ing management theories he had picked up in previous jobs. “He was busy as a bee,” his wife recalls.“In fact, he spent more time and energy selling clothes than in making them.”

At first, things went well. Major art galleries were displaying and selling the workshop's clothes, and people in artistic, literary, and cultural circles became his customers. By the end of the first year, the workshop was making money and Cheng's reputation was on the rise. He began to think about expanding, perhaps switching to more market-oriented pro­duction methods.“That was so unlike him,” his wife says.“He's an ordinary guy who appreciates the simple life and doesn't hanker after material things. He hates the trouble and worries that come with money. I guess he got temporarily carried away. I did, too. We were concentrating so hard on making this thing work that we never thought about the risks.”

Then in 1987, something brought Cheng up with a jolt. Oddly enough, it was a check he could not cash that helped get him back on track. The check was issued by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and it was made payable to the order of“Modern Craft Center of Textiles and Dyes.” That was indeed the name of Cheng's work­shop, but because he had not registered the company officially the check could not be cashed. Cheng drove home from the bank feeling like a deflated balloon. He took the rest of the day off: the first real break he had had that year, the first time he could lie back and really think about his work. “That check was like a wake-up call to me,” he says. “I suddenly realized that I wasn't happy working like this—having market pressures and always striving to expand. I wasn't able to enjoy the process of creation as much as I expected. And worst of all, I was losing the passion I felt for clothes.” He tore up all his name cards, ripped the brand labels out of his stock of garments, and mounted the check in a picture frame as a souvenir.

The workshop has remained a small­ scale operation ever since, turning out approximately fifty items of clothing a day with the help of its freelance seam­stresses. One reason for this lack of expansion is that Cheng no longer oes in for marketing. Customers phone to place an order and often pick it up themselves when it is ready. Word of mouth counts for a lot, with old clients frequently introduc­ing the clothes to friends. Instead of visit­ing potential customers or working on developing new markets, Cheng and his wife simply focus on making clothes—although when they have time they cannot resist using their cherished wooden loom, half a century old, for manufacturing small quantities of cloth to be given to friends for use as wall hangings.

The only expansion has been in the variety of their products. Because they never weed anything out, the inclusion of more colors and styles has inevitably meant that their output has grown. Nowa­days, they carry about three hundred color­shades, short-and long-sleeves, three adult sizes, and children's one-size-fits-all. They concentrate on four basic garments: coats, tops, slacks and skirts. Of course, there are variations. Some field coats are hooded and some unhooded. There are V-neck pullovers, and buttoned and buttonless tunics. Slacks come with either elasticized waistbands or a drawcord; skirts and pantskirts are either gathered­waist, straight, or full.

Their best-selling item is a classic—a generously sized top that can be worn as a shirt or a jacket, featuring a jewel neck with banded collar, fastened down the front by five cloth buttons. Light, machine­ washable, and available in cotton, linen, or silk, this roomy garment is familiar, casual, and above all comfortable.

The workshop has clung to its original ideal of fashion-resistant clothing. One of the most popular lines is a pair of uni­-sex pants, available in elastic-waisted and drawcord versions, that features extra­ roomy cut and deep side pockets. Like all of Cheng's designs, the pants come in plain, solid colors, but every kind of shade.

Functionalism is a major characteris­tic of Cheng's work, and he attributes this, at least in part, to his childhood experi­ences.“A lot of my early memories ante­date the coming of Western fashions to Taiwan. My father used to own just one suit: a front-buttoned jacket plus a pair of farmer's slacks. All his contemporaries were the same. They wore the suit the whole day—for breakfast, for going to work in the rice paddies, for bed, for wed­dings, and for funerals. I like that attitude. Why do we insist on changing our clothes whenever we change what we're doing?”

In Taiwan, people's lifestyles have changed dramatically, just as they have everywhere else. People go to work, enjoy leisure time, and take longer vacations, all with far more variations than were available in long ago in predomi­nantly agricultural eras.“The concept of a-suit-for-all-occasions is worth reviv­ing,” Cheng says.“People need highly functional clothes more than ever. Life is getting unbearably complicated, so doesn't it make sense at least to simplify what you wear?” Drawing on the lifestyles of ordinary people—a category in which he includes himself, his wife, and their three children—Cheng has come up with garments that are suitable for both gen­ders, for the old and the young, and for most occasion too.

The hallmark of Cheng’s output remains its simplicity. The design of Buddhist monks’ and nuns’ habits has had a profound influence on his style. According to him, religious vestments—it does not matter whether the religion is predominantly Eastern or Western—are the nearest thing we have to mankind's original fabric cloth­ing.“Those are the clothes that change least over time,” he says.“For example, the clothes worn by Theravada Buddhist monks today are very similar to those that Sakymuni Buddha wore two thousand years ago. The monks still don't wear shoes, and basically they cover themselves with two pieces of cloth tied with a cloth rope.” With the help of friends in Nepal, Thailand, and Korea, he has collected for­eign and local Buddhist figurines, and he has used these to trace the evolution of monks' clothes from a one-piece robe to the cut-and-sewn raiment seen today. For the same reason Cheng also collects con­temporary monks' and nuns' robes and even their faded, patched-and-mended pants, claiming to see in them the origins of all clothing.

He stresses that he has no intention of promoting any particular religion, but says that reverting to the earliest garment styles has helped him build up his own design philosophy. “I think the primitive role of dress was its best role,” he asserts.“We have those garments made in ancient times, with the barest of materials and without any unnecessary design element, yet somehow they manage to convey a certain dignity.” He points out that the de­sign of religious robes reveals a high level of aestheticism—proof that something simple can also be beautiful. And this gives him confidence when making his own minimalist clothing. A good example is his latest creation, which also happens to be his current favorite: an overcoat based on a monk's robe, generously cut, with two patch pockets.

“Clothing manufacturers around the world all try to make a statement with the clothes they make,” Cheng says. “Some products label the wearer as a member of a certain ethnic group, an inhabitant of a particular region, or a disciple of some religion. Clothes also make statements about a person’s views on the environment and politics, although sometimes excessive decoration and tricky design turn them into overstatements. I make a statement with the clothes I produce, too. I believe in living the simple life. For me, good clothes simply have to be simple.”