Multi-brand fashion boutique Lang has set up shop in Los Angeles’ new format Row DTLA complex. Founded by Kayla Wong, the mission-driven retail platform showcases gender-neutral apparel from Asian-founded brands and independent talents. Local architect Paul Chan brought down the scale of the raw, post-industrial space by creating a series of theatrical vignettes staged with custom furnishings and finishes that contrast, fuse – and ultimately transcend – references to Asian and North American culture.
Lang founder Kayla Wong and architect Paul Chan
‘The design grew from the shared experience Kayla and I have of growing up in Hong Kong and now living in Los Angeles, carrying a sense of being between two places at once,’ Chan says. ‘Our native home became the muse but the store is not a direct recreation. It’s an assemblage of fragments and memories transformed through their encounter with our adoptive city.’
To achieve fluidity across the 1,200 sq ft storefront, the studio eschewed fixed walls in favour of a layered curtain system that, as Chan puts it, ‘plays both a practical and atmospheric role’.
Areas can be enclosed to more dramatically emphasise the products but also open up for better circulation during large gatherings.
While primarily presenting fashions, Lang also serves as an non-prescriptive cultural venue for the community, playing host to exhibitions, talks and performances. Accommodating guests at such events, a semi-circular bench is upholstered in a fabric, developed in collaboration with Los Angeles textile studio Suay that recalls the red, white and blue woven utility bags usually found at hardware stores, construction sites and street markets throughout Hong Kong.
‘Rather than using the original plastic material, we translated its familiar palette of custom tie-dyed textile that also references Southern California surf culture,’ Chan adds. ‘The result reinterprets one cultural symbol through the visual language and material practices of another.’
Above the bench, he introduced four tiers of paper lanterns painted with colloquial Cantonese sayings. The installation helps to wrap but also illuminate this impromptu stage setting.
The overall design is a study in contrasts, which the architect describes as ‘gloss and grit, opulence and improvisation'. Mahogany shelving and moiré-patterned mauve surfaces are joined by hand-brushed and reflective metallic finishes. Bespoke furnishings tie everything together.
Take handmade washi paper surfaces topping display tables throughout. Though traditional in appearance, their surfaces are actually collaged together from upcycled paper collected across Asia and Latin America, including cotton rags from southern India; banana fibre from Thailand; Amate paper made by Otomí artisans in central Mexico; and Yucatán papers that combine age-old Mayan papermaking and Japanese washi techniques.
‘For me, these tables are a metaphor for Los Angeles and its Asian American communities,’ says Chan. ‘The individual cultures do not dissolve into one another; they remain distinct while continually overlapping, borrowing and influencing each other... They suggest that identity is never singular, it is layered, assembled and continually evolving' – a perfect analogy for the design of Lang itself.
Lang is located at Row DTLA, 777 S. Alameda Street, Building M2, Suite 132, Los Angeles, CA 90021