A haute couture collection of the ages: the one-of-a-kind clothes of Susan Casden, former Hong Kong ‘tai tai’
- Casden fell in love with couture in Paris nearly 20 years ago and has since built a collection even New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has interest in
- She lived in Hong Kong from 1978 to 1994, and was married to Tony Fung, scion of Hong Kong financial services firm Sun Hung Kai & Co
In 1983, Susan Casden was living in Hong Kong and leafing through the pages of a fashion magazine when she chanced upon a photo of a dress from Chanel’s most recent haute couture collection – a black, silk, crepe, floor-length gown in a sculpted silhouette.
“That was my dream dress,” Casden says. “I wasn’t a couture buyer in 1983. I was very young and having kids. But that dress always stayed in the back of my mind.”
In the early 2000s, as Casden was starting to cement her rise as one of Paris couture’s most beloved patrons, she asked the people at Chanel if they could delve into their ateliers and recreate that 1983 dress for her. They said that as long as they could find every bead and crystal, exactly as it was on that first runway outing, they could. It took them six months. Close to two decades on from first seeing the Trompe L’Oeil, Casden finally got her dream dress.
Casden was once Susan Fung, wife of Tony Fung Wing-cheung, scion of Hong Kong financial services firm Sun Hung Kai & Co. She lived in Hong Kong from 1978 to 1994, during which she describes her lifestyle as that of a “tai tai” (a wealthy married woman who doesn’t work).
“It was very social,” she says. “I had a great group of friends that was very cosmopolitan. It was an exciting time to be there.”