Feng Chen Wang RTW Spring 2024 Paris

The designer is wooing a more mature consumer with her increased focus on tailoring while continuing to develop her buzzy street-savvy signatures.

“Even the leaves have their own memories,” said Feng Chen Wang ahead of a spring show where she mixed artisanal techniques such as botanical contact printing on silk with her playbook of streetwise utility and unfussy tailoring.

As a starting point to the season, titled “Memories. Imprinted.,” the designer looked back at the memories she created with her late grandmother, choosing her favorite plants to be rolled into the silk used for the leaf print or representing hazier impressions as colors on transparent textiles — silk organza or nylons, depending on where she placed the cursor of sportiness.

Tailoring, increasingly prominent in her recent collections, was sharply cut and peppered with refinements that drew on her Chinese heritage, informing the shape of a jacket’s lapels or fabric fastening with wood buttons. Elsewhere, a rounded neckline taken from traditional clothing had something of the baseball jersey, too, and epitomized the kind of catchy cross-cultural pollination Wang enjoys plying.

But that’s not to say she left behind the denim and deconstructed wares of seasons past. Those yielded trompe-l’oeil double-layered blazers, jacquards in a dragon motif — nodding to romantic tales but also to the tutelar sign for the next lunar year.

Looks with acid green touches toward the end served as a teaser of sorts to her upcoming Nike collaboration. But don’t expect to see these pieces in stores: Wang took the commercial items that will drop in September, turning the likes of a parka and activewear into dresses.