WENJUE LU & MICHAEL FANG

The multidisciplinary duo behind label Wenjüe Lu channel the spirit of mending and the inner self into natural garments.

I first met Wenjue Lu in March of this year at her exhibit, Selected Poetic Transfigurations, featured in LATITUDE Gallery New York. Her multi-medium show consisted of garments, soft sculptures, and other installations meticulously crafted out of cotton. Dressed head to toe in an off-white monochrome ensemble, she perfectly complemented the neutral tones of her exhibition.

After graduating from Parsons School of Design in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Lu decided to build her eponymous label, Wenjüe Lu. For Lu, fashion is not a commodity, but rather a canvas on which to explore abstract concepts, like her philosophy of “slowing down.”

With the help of her partner, Michael Fang, the pair bring Lu’s vision to life in their studio space in Brooklyn, transforming organic materials into natural works of art (both physically and symbolically).

“Most importantly, it's got to be interactive,” Fang notes while describing Lu’s garments. “When people wear Wenjue’s work and choose to appreciate her work, they are also adopting this attitude of being less restricted and having this natural outlook on life.”

"When people wear Wenjue’s work and choose to appreciate her work, they are also adopting this attitude towards life of being less restricted and having this natural outlook on life."

—Michael Fang

Lu compares her artistic process to writing poetry, blending traditional techniques, like Japanese Sashiko embroidery, with her own imaginative designs in order to convey meaning and emotion in one cohesive form. These techniques are like the rhetorical devices of Lu’s work, intricately woven together into pieces that appear simplistic at first, yet elaborate the closer you look.

She often uses muslin, an undyed cotton fabric that fashion students typically use for prototypes of their designs. “The quality of muslin makes me think about the relationship between [the] body and clothes,” she says. “The body touches the clothes and those organic materials; those natural fabrics don’t have that many chemicals or undergo mechanical production processes. It's actually the essence of naturalness and nature.”

"I feel like I'm physically living in New York, but mentally I'm living in the mountains or in a forest."

—Wenjue Lu

For their collection 22/1, also entitled Variegated Eidolons, Lu and Fang drew inspiration from the poetry of Walt Whitman and variegation — a term that describes the contrasting colors of plants caused by a lack of chlorophyll, which leaves distinct patterns on leaves.

“The natural green turning into white fits our aesthetic of using natural colored cotton, and a lot of the natural colored fabrics that give off this off-white color tone,” Fang adds.

While variegation touches on the aesthetic, the conceptual intentions behind 22/1 are distilled in the word eidolons. Lu describes an eidolon as a “spiritual image of a living or dead object or a metaphysical phantom containing self-distinct ideals.”

She views her creations as wearable pieces of art instead of commercialized products. “When Wenjue is making clothes, you can see a lot of ghostly parts of the garment that are not functional, but it functions more as art,” Fang says. “Like the little flowers that she puts on her pants; those flowers are not what makes the garment functional, but it’s a statement when those flowers are planted on the pants,” he continues.

Every garment captures the brand’s ideologies of embracing imperfections, navigating the inner self, and “mending life.”

“Rather than seeing my designs as a fashion collection, I see them more just as clothes or garments that are meant to last and to be cherished — not in this purely exterior or superficial way,” Lu says. “I also don't want to pander [to] any particular trend with the intention of gaining more commercial success. So I don’t like to label myself as a fashion designer; I like to step backwards from fashion,” she laughs.

All images courtesy of Wenjue Lu. Correction (6/26/22): In select copies of our print issue (001) and in a previous version of this article, the 22/1 collection by Lu and Fang is referred to as Variegated Indolence. The correct name is Variegated Eidolons. The word indolence has been changed to eidolon(s).