Angel Chang on Building Resilience Through Centuries-Old Crafts

To make her namesake womenswear line, New York–based designer Angel Chang had to forget everything she knew about fashion. Her label’s clothing is made using age-old techniques developed by China’s indigenous Miao and Dong ethnic minority tribes, whose procedures are at risk of disappearing because a younger generation has, in recent years, largely been indifferent to learning them. Chang, who was born in central Indiana to Chinese immigrants, first encountered Guizhou Province’s garment-making methods while visiting the Shanghai Museum, where she saw traditional costumes—vivid, elaborately detailed attire akin to haute couture—and spent the next 10 years developing a supply chain to make them available to a wider audience. She tracked down artisans (many of them grandmothers) in far-flung villages, learned Chinese, and even moved to the region, immersing herself in its way of life. There she discovered a distinctive relationship with time—one that depends on nature in lieu of a clock—that informs the slow, faithful process by which her clothes are constructed.

Chang never set out to run a sustainable fashion label. But the system she created, which involves waiting six months for cotton seeds to grow and a weaving process that yields barely 10 feet of fabric a day, produces zero-carbon clothing. Each piece, from “seed to button,” as she puts it, is manufactured within a 30-mile radius, without the use of electricity or chemicals. It’s too complicated for fashion companies to become “sustainable,” Chang says on this episode of Time Sensitive; they need to build new supply chains from the ground up. The one she devised serves as a model, even a noble, alternative to fast fashion.

On this episode, Chang describes the journey of patience and persistence that forged the infrastructure for her brand, talking with Spencer about persuading high fashion houses to preserve these traditional garment-making techniques; the prolonged, enlightening process of befriending Chinese artisans; harnessing wit and WeChat to build supply chains for her collection; and why indigenous knowledge is key to addressing climate change.