Designer Fong-Leng celebrates 60 years of fashion art

The Jan Art Museum is dedicating an exhibition to the Dutch fashion icon Fong-Leng on her 60th anniversary in the industry.

The excitement at the press opening of ‘Fong-Leng & Fans – 60 Years of Fashion & Fame’ at the museum in Amstelveen, near Amsterdam, is palpable. Will the 88-year-old fashion artist still appear herself? Then she arrives, fashionably late: the grande dame of Dutch fashion. She’s dressed in a flowing pantsuit, wearing statement jewelry and her signature large, light-lens sunglasses. The murmur falls silent. Her performance is a statement in itself, with the flair that made her an icon decades ago.

Sixty years in business

Chinese-Dutch Fong-Leng, born Carla Maria Fong-Leng Tsang, is celebrating sixty years in the fashion industry. In the early 1970s she opened her first fashion boutique on the Nieuwendijk in Amsterdam. There the champagne flowed, oysters were served and clothes that no one recognized were presented. They were opulent, theatrical creations made of leather, silk and suede, decorated with natural motifs. She became the most sensational designer in the Netherlands. Their second boutique on PC Hooftstraat became a hotspot for art-loving Amsterdam. It was no ordinary shop, but a lively meeting place for artists, musicians and fashion icons. Her clientele was as diverse as it was impressive. He ranged from the eccentric Mathilde Willink, the then wife of the magical realist painter Carel Willink, to the singer Kate Bush and the businesswoman Miep Brons.

An explosion of color and whimsy

In the first room, nine of Fong-Leng’s fashion creations stand on golden pedestals. Her signature style is unmistakable: a gold leather coat with appliqued birds, a mid-length jacket made of azure blue metallic leather with white calla lilies and a faux fur leopard coat with a suede corset on top. “The attention to the material, the craftsmanship, the imagination – that is their strength,” says guest curator Lisa Goudsmit. “What particularly touches me is her artistic breakthrough and her independence. She grew up in the multicultural Rotterdam district of Katendrecht, the daughter of a Chinese father and a Dutch mother. Without connections or privileges, she made her way into the fashion world, which was then dominated by male couturiers. Although she completed a fashion apprenticeship, she developed her own style completely independently and thus made her mark internationally names. She did a really great job.”

Shows as spectacles

A gold runner leads to a large video screen with archive footage of her sensational fashion shows. These immediately make it clear why she was a sensation back then. Fong-Leng presented her collections not in stuffy salons, but in unconventional locations. These included the stadium of the football club PSV Eindhoven, the Beurs van Berlage (former Amsterdam Stock Exchange), the Scheveningen pier and even the De Mirandabad swimming pool, where models threw inflatable balls to each other. They danced, sometimes topless, to loud pop music and the designer often joined in too.

Typically Fong-Leng: stubborn down to the smallest detail. She even charged entry to her shows, including from journalists, which was a first in the fashion world. But those who were there knew that it was worth every guilder. Even today, the energy literally radiates from the recordings. A big contrast to the reserved fashion shows of her contemporaries, where the models looked straight ahead and the audience watched in silence. For Fong-Leng, fashion was theater, celebration and joie de vivre.

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Wearable collage art and folds

Although Fong-Leng no longer designs clothes and focuses primarily on large tableaus made of leather and suede, she remains a source of inspiration for new generations of fashion designers. The exhibition shows her work alongside those of seven contemporary designers, such as Ronald van der Kemp (RVDK), Bas Kosters and David Laport. The connections are amazing. Van der Kemp shares her collage approach with reused materials and layered combinations of silk, wool and leather. Bas Kosters, who always openly expresses his admiration for Fong-Leng in interviews, shares her love of color, humor and expression. David Laport is known for his sculptural pleated creations and draws inspiration from their signature pleating technique. “Wool pleated blinds with silk moss,” is how Fong-Leng describes one of her creations. Laport follows this up with an old pink dress from his ‘Local Vegetation’ collection, in which the folds stand upright like stylized petals.

But Fong-Leng’s ‘fans’ are not only found among young designers. Her work is passionately collected and admired by fashion lovers and professionals. These include the photographer Ferry van der Nat and the fashion journalist John de Greef, who has accompanied Fong-Leng since the beginning of his career. Her enthusiasm underlines how timeless and relevant her work remains today.

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Denim, leather and extravagant shoes

In both her ‘leather paintings’ and her wearable artworks, Fong-Leng uses a technique she developed herself. She sets scenes in fabric, often leather, which is reminiscent of patchwork. Jan Jansen’s sculptural shoes can also be seen in the exhibition. He regularly designed shoes for Fong-Leng’s shows in the 1970s. They are extravagant creations made of multicolored leather that are as spectacular as the clothing itself.

A lesser-known chapter in her work is her collaboration with Levi’s in 1983 and 1984. She designed a collection for the US denim label that was presented to the world press in Venice. The pieces were accessible but inventive – like the so-called scale jacket, a denim jacket with cleverly shaped sleeves. They will be shown alongside innovative denim creations from Atelier Reservé and Ruben Jurriën. These demonstrate in their own way how groundbreaking an everyday material like denim can be.

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On the sofa at Fong-Leng’s house

In the last room, visitors literally enter Fong-Leng’s world. The room is a reconstruction of her living room. Life-size photos of her interior can be seen on the sides. On the walls are two white leather sofas by Jan des Bouvrie, which Fong-Leng himself decorated with leather applications of snakes. “That’s how it went,” she says animatedly. “I had seen the sofas at Jan des Bouvrie, but I thought they weren’t finished yet. Then I got the leather skins, worked them, and then the sofas were assembled.”

Museum director Marieke Uildriks smiles: “I saw the sofas at her house once and thought: They have to go into the exhibition. So I just asked. And luckily she said yes.” Fong-Leng answers quickly: “This is a unique situation, I can finally vacuum under the sofa again!”

Their showpiece hangs above the sofas: a meter-long tapestry made of five panels. Tropical plants, baboons, Greek columns with marble structures – all ‘painted’ in leather, suede and fur. “I was afraid it would never be finished,” she admits. “But I kept going. This is my masterpiece.”

Fong-Leng says she doesn’t want to convey a message with her work. People should fantasize about it themselves. “You can’t have enough imagination. My whole life is fantasy,” she said at the press opening. Her way of working also shows great dedication. She describes herself as a ‘worker’ who focuses on a craft that is rarely found today.

Their technique draws on centuries-old traditions, such as the gold leather wallpaper that was popular among the wealthy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Anyone who sees their work in context – from extravagant coats to colorful tapestries to jewelry and tableaux with masks – feels that everything tells a single story: fantasy interwoven with craftsmanship. And perhaps that is her greatest legacy: she proves that imagination and craft are not mutually exclusive, but rather mutually reinforcing.

Fong-Leng and Mathilde Willink

The exhibition is part of a special collaboration between Museum Jan and Museum More, housed in Kasteel Ruurlo. From November 21st, the relationship between Fong-Leng and her friend Mathilde Willink will be examined there. A joint publication on both exhibitions will be published by Waanders Uitgevers.

This iconic friendship can also be felt in the Jan Museum. One wall is dedicated to the ‘living work of art’ Willink. Touching documents hang between photos and sketches, such as a pen drawing of a tree with three intertwined trunks entitled ‘Sancta Trinitas’. Underneath it, Willink wrote in solid block letters: “For my beloved Fong-Leng. A kneeling before your craftsmanship, your talent and your ingenuity, truly a holy trinity. Your Mathilde.”

It’s an intimate detail, but also a key to Fong-Leng’s world. Her work is not just about aesthetics, but about connection – between the creator and the wearer, between art and life. In her friendship with Willink she found a soul mate who embodied her fantasy. Together they created an image of freedom and stubbornness that is still alive more than fifty years later. ‘Fong-Leng & Fans’ is therefore not about nostalgia, but rather about admiration for a woman who elevates fashion to art and art to an attitude to life.

Fong-Leng & Fans – 60 years of Fashion & Fame can be seen at the JAN Museum in Amstelveen until April 6, 2026.