Angels with dirty faces

WILLIAM Tang is almost as famous for making mischief in the Hong Kong fashion world as he is for his clothes. Only he would try to upstage his own contribution to Hong Kong Fashion Week, which starts on January 18 at the Convention Centre, by opening a 'non-fashion' exhibition, Clothesque III, on the same day at the Fringe Festival. And only he would claim to be inspired by what he calls the 'angels of the street' - tramps, panhandlers, winos and runaways - the only people in Hong Kong, says Tang, with any real individuality.

This is the designer who has previously claimed inspiration from the proletariat (Farmers, Workers And Soldiers collection) and peasants (Miao minorities in Hunan). All that hotel lobby catwalk stuff bores him - 'I hate it,' he says decisively - and change for the sake of change irritates him. 'I don't see why my customers need new clothes every season. I wear the same things for years and I still feel good in them.' Championing the style of the untouchables of the street is about as far as he can go toward debunking the fashion circus.

'There's one old lady who wanders around Central, she's quite famous, and she always in yellow, like Comme des Garcons,' he says. 'She's very graceful, very clean and she never talks to anybody, nobody knows who she is. There is a story that she is waiting for her lover. If anyone ever asks me who I think is the best-dressed person in Hong Kong, I say she is.' From a different person such posturing would be irritating, not to say ungrateful. Fashion, after all, has been good to him. From Tang, a scion of one of the posher bits of the Tang clan who holds forth with impeccable manners and charm, it sounds quite endearing. Designers who say they love creating clothes, but hate the pretentious pizzazz that goes with it, aren't that uncommon. Azzedine Alaia and Christian Lacroix, for example, are both on the record as hating the fuss. Tang is just the only one in Hong Kong who says it, and he has been for years, enjoying the bad-boy label it gives him.

Clothesque III - two of his assistants also contribute, hence the III - was inspired by the tattoos he saw in the New Zealand film Once Were Warriors ('I don't have the guts to have one myself but I love to look,' Tang says). The tattoos set off a train of thought about how people decorate themselves. And then he began to notice how the street sleepers of Hong Kong decorated themselves, how even those people with nowhere to live, often took trouble with the way they looked. 'They don't really put on clothes sometimes, they just use cloth, it's amazing. Whatever pleases them, they wear,' Tang says.

'Those street people, they don't know what others think of them, they even expose their bodies sometimes. Everyone else is so concerned with their image. Maybe that is true personal taste. The rest of us only care about how others look at us. I saw a man the other day pushing along some boxes dressed only in shorts, someone had given him a flag and he had stuck it to his tit! Things like that are what makes this city interesting.' The exhibition will not be a literal recreation of such sights but a collection of mannequins and outfits. 'I'm not trying to balance out my other collections,' Tang says. 'This is just a bit of fancy.' Materials for both the clothes and the mannequins will be scavenged from the debris found on local streets, as his angels must. While his TDC collection is composed of stretchy wool Lycra, the Fringe version uses plastic bags, brown paper and interlining (usually used for stiffening collars and cuffs).

For our picture, Tang rustles up a mannequin out of rolled-up newspaper, Sellotape and cardboard tubes. The finished product is a stylish, towering female form dressed in a long skirt, wide cuffs and cellophane scarf. The final touch is the ubiquitous pink-and-blue striped bag, hung elegantly over one elbow. Other mannequins will be made of copper mesh and fencing, the outfits crafted from leftovers like newspapers. To kick off the show, City Contemporary Dance Company dancer, Yuri Ng, will perform as an angel, weaving in and out of the models.

Tang insists there is no deeper message to this exhibition but the fallen-angels references seem terribly biblical. His terminology suggests Tang thinks of street people as pitiful innocents, an idea he takes to extremes with a model designed as a drooping Christ figure, arms outstretched, head hanging.