A pinstripe suiting, the kind that signals boardrooms, quiet authority, nothing out of place, has been cut down into a harness, its leather seat left exposed beneath it. Elsewhere, a shirt is crossed at the back with gauze strapping, tied off like a wound dressing. These are the kinds of collisions that define Forgotten Skin, the debut collection from designer Jean Chang. Originally from Taiwan and now based in New York, Chang studied Fashion Design at Parsons, followed by a Master’s in Fashion Management. In her first collection, familiar signals of formality and control are taken apart and rebuilt as something far more intimate.
For Chang, that collision isn’t incidental, it’s the whole approach. “I don’t think anything exists as just one thing, there are always different sides to it, and I think that tension is where a lot of the beauty comes from,” she explains. That belief shapes how she builds a garment: “something structured next to something delicate, covering the body while revealing parts of it, or taking something that feels protective and making it intimate.”
The collection grew intuitively, starting with a pile of military surplus and medical pieces that Chang began, in her words, taking apart mentally, “looking at how they were constructed, why certain details existed, and how function shaped the garment.” That research pulled in two very different vocabularies: the authority of a uniform, and the clinical intimacy of a medical support garment. “There’s something cold and clinical about them, yet they’re designed to sit incredibly close to the skin, to support, protect or heal the body. I found that contradiction really beautiful.”
The name of the brand comes from the same instinct. Clothing, Chang points out, does a lot of communicating on its own, identity, status, strength, while the body underneath it goes largely unnoticed. Forgotten Skin is her attempt to reverse that: “The name came from wanting to return attention to the skin, and to treat it as the first layer of the garment rather than something that always needs to be covered.”
That idea plays out piece by piece. A gauze-strapped shirt crosses the back like a support dressing. An orthopedic leg brace becomes the structural basis for a leather gaiter. A support brace, the kind built to hold a body still, is reworked in mesh and pinstripe until it reads as ornament rather than medical equipment. Pinstripe wool in particular gets pulled furthest from its original context: Chang uses it “to create a harness shape around the body, something much more intimate and sexual, to disrupt its usual connotations and play with that tension.” Leather does similar work from the other direction, “strong and protective, but also sensual”, set against sheer, fluid fabrics that let skin show through in patches.
Chang treats a garment as something unfinished until it’s worn. “A garment only really comes alive once there’s a body inside it,” she says. “On a hanger, a piece can look rigid, almost architectural. But once it’s worn, movement softens it, and the straps and openings start to behave differently depending on how the person moves and breathes.” That’s consistent with a process note from the collection’s accompanying portfolio, where Chang describes the work as an investigation into “how certain clothes hold the body, how they decide where it should stay and how it should behave”, and her decision to loosen that control rather than reinforce it.
The palette reinforces the same tension between clinical and intimate. Chang describes it as “almost utopian: pale blues, whites, silver, purple and washed-out tones”, colors pulled directly from hospitals, surgical gowns, and medical steel. “I was interested in how colours that signal cleanliness and care can also feel cold and slightly unreal.”
Building the collection changed how Chang thinks about construction itself. Studying the seams, fastenings and support structures of military and medical garments taught her that “construction isn’t just the final execution of an idea, it can actually help me think through the idea. Sometimes changing how something is made completely changes what it communicates.”
Looking ahead, Chang wants to push the modularity already present in Forgotten Skin further, pieces that adapt depending on who’s wearing them, with detachable and adjustable elements, and a growing interest in accessories as another way of framing the body. As she puts it, she’s interested in seeing “how these ideas can grow beyond individual garments and become more of a system of dressing.”
