Ping Chen
Ping Chen is a London-based fashion designer and textile artist from South China, with a design background from Goldsmiths, University of London. His practice explores body, identity, and memory through experimental garment construction and textile-based research. His project Thing in Itself was selected for the London Design Festival 2025, and he is the recipient of the Christine Risley Award 2025. Ping has exhibited in London (UK), Shenzhen and Beijing (CN), with features in Horizont Magazine and an upcoming solo exhibition at the Constance Howard Gallery, curated by Selvedge Magazine as part of London Textiles Month 2025.
Thing in Itself is a design inquiry into the fluidity of masculinity and identity, articulated through a reversible tailored suit with multifunctional structures. Inspired by my great-grandfather’s gentle presence in a Chinese tunic suit, the design translates caring gestures into structural garment language.
Drawing from androgynous tailoring, deconstruction, and multicultural identity, the project subverts menswear’s conventional boundaries by integrating historically coded feminine elements. A reinterpreted baby carrier becomes a back panel and collar, linked with apron forms and engageante-style sleeves and connected by brassiere hooks for easy assembly and disassembly. Trousers feature extended zippers to transform into a skirt, altering form and function.
Each garment in itself—fluid, hybrid, and genderless—is like an orchid blooming quietly under every gaze, embodying a softness that is not weakness but strength, and a design that does not dictate who one should be, but frees one to become.
Project Gallery
