Maggie Fan, founder and creative director of Tang Chi Couture, made her New York Fashion Week debut with In Between…, a 25-look Spring/Summer 2027 collection that also marked the brand’s first venture into ready-to-wear and made-to-order pieces.
Fan rooted the collection in the uncomfortable spaces of transformation. The space between blossoming and rotting, beauty and mortality, and when romance transforms into obsession or danger. Nature became the obvious language to communicate these transformations, but not nature at its most idyllic. More so, nature at the point when something beautiful becomes overripe, begins to wilt, or reveals its teeth.
Stepping into the Georgia Room, the tension was immediately present. The world of Tang Chi Couture was hushed and velvety. A deep-purple calla lily was on every seat, its stem wrapped with a single dramatic ribbon. Candles sat beneath trails of hardened wax alongside dried, maroon flowers and crown moldings. The room was romantic to the point of being slightly funereal, as if Miss Havisham had discovered fashion week. Fan invited us to step into a transitional space, where everything beautiful seemed to have something dying beside it.
With her opening look, Fan set the collection’s tone. Look 1 from the front was almost straightforwardly seductive: a drop-waist dress with a black tulle skirt, tulle framing the breasts, and enormous black tail feathers erupting from the center of the ribcage. But as the model passed, the illusion broke. On her back, a bird’s head emerged from a bloodied opening, transforming the feathers from adornment into evidence. The model suddenly seemed impaled by the very creature decorating her dress. Wanting the audience to feel uncomfortable, she asked us to linger in the space between light and darkness. The closer you looked at something beautiful, the more sinister it became.
Photo by The Knockturnal
Throughout the collection, Fan’s dramatization of the female form recalled The New Look. Christian Dior’s silhouette similarly exaggerated the body into an almost fantastical vision of femininity. Fan cinched waists, expanded hips into massive structured skirts, and continually reshaped the body through corsetry and volume. But where Dior used exaggeration to create an idealized feminine silhouette, Fan pushed that ideal past beauty and into something stranger. Black feathers crept up around the face, exposed skirt hoops revealed the architecture beneath otherwise delicate gowns, and pearls, tulle, and satin became tools not simply to decorate the body, but to distort and obscure it.
There was a moth-to-the-flame quality to it all. Fan continually drew the eye toward the things we instinctively understand as beautiful. The sheen of silk, strands of pearls, rich color, and clouds of tulle complicate that attraction with drastic proportions, exposed structures, dense layering, and dramatic turtlenecks. The clothes seemed to operate on the same principle as the opening look: seduction first, danger second. Everything was beautiful, but almost nothing was entirely safe.
Photo by The Knockturnal
The collection’s new ready-to-wear pieces stripped away much of that architecture, but not the sense of danger. Without the corsetry, cages and exaggerated proportions of the couture, Fan’s silhouettes became leaner and more languid. At times this recalled the sensual minimalism of the ’90s. Sheer black tulle skimmed rather than sculpted the body, while eggplant silks fell into relatively simple columns. The effect was quieter, but perhaps more seductive. Where couture threatened to consume the women wearing it, ready-to-wear let the body emerge, only to cloak it in colors and textures that still suggested something bruised, wilting, or just beginning to decay.
Photo by The Knockturnal
In In Between…, nothing was allowed to remain simply beautiful. Romance tipped into obsession, femininity into distortion, and delicacy into something more threatening. Fan was most interested in that precise moment of transformation, when the thing that draws you in becomes the very thing you should fear.
