THE WASHINGTON POST: Is fashion ready for Alexander Wang’s return?

Fashion likes to think of itself as holding a mirror to the world’s values and insecurities, but it usually provides more of an exaggerated funhouse reflection.

And sometimes that can be more revealing than the picture-perfect image. We live in a time of magical uncancellations - Liam Neeson and Brad Pitt were this summer’s box-office darlings; Louis C.K. is still selling out shows - but in fashion, there’s been a forgive-and-really-truly-forget attitude for years now. John Galliano, Bruce Weber, Dolce & Gabbana: all are successful again following scandals that threatened to derail their careers.

“The industry has the memory of a goldfish, especially when commerce is involved,” said Bryan Yambao, a writer and influencer known as Bryanboy. “What we’ve lost is a shared metric of accountability. It used to be shame, then it became silence, and now it’s just speed. The story dies as quickly as the next headline drops.”

And then there is Alexander Wang. On Friday, Wang will stage his 20th anniversary show, his first on the New York Fashion Week calendar since February 2018 - a move that, despite the temperature on public sin (or private sins turned public), has surprised many in the American fashion community. A Vogue Runway Instagram post announcing his return was met with resoundingly negative comments.

In early 2021, 11 men accused Wang of sexual assault. (Wang did not face any criminal charges based on the allegations.) Wang at first denied the claims, but later, he met with the accusers, who shared their experiences, and then posted on apology on Instagram.

“I support their right to come forward, and I’ve listened carefully to what they had to say,” he wrote in March 2021. “It was not easy for them to share their stories, and I regret acting in a way that caused them pain.” Lisa Bloom, the famed lawyer who was representing several of his accusers, tweeted on the same day that the apology was acknowledged: “we are moving forward.”

How has Wang moved forward? In the intervening years, he has attempted to evolve the Alexander Wang image from party-girl designs by a New York party boy, to a brand of commercially straightforward clothes emphasizing his Chinese heritage. He staged his first show after the scandal, in April 2022, in LA’s Chinatown, and Friday’s show will take place in an enormous 101-year-old building he recently purchased in New York’s Chinatown from HSBC and which he plans to turn into a community centre of sorts.

“I think there’s a lot of people that probably don’t believe that I deserve to be in business and all of that, but I do believe, more so than ever, that what I’m here to do is, I can do more good by creating positive impact,” Wang said in an interview earlier this month, “and I think that’s what really drives me and that’s what I tried to stay focused on, you know what I mean?”

We were sitting on two sofas facing each other in his minimalist, black and white office in the South Street Seaport, where eight big black “ALEXANDER WANG” flags fly on the roof like banners on a medieval fortress.

“I think, as you know, time passes and time heals everything, and as you get further away from kind of like, the nucleus of the things, you realize that everything that was meant to happen happened for a reason,” he said. “I’m on a path now where I feel completely energized about what the future looks like, and I also feel like if you can’t walk through the valleys, how are you supposed to enjoy the peaks?”

Firmly in the limelight for the first time in years, Wang seems eager to re-enter the fashion conversation and to stick to his talking points. He emphasizes that he can “only speak from personal experience,” several times throughout our conversation. “I can’t speak for anybody else who has gone through anything other than what I know my experience felt like.”

He is thrilled, though vague, about what the building will be: “We’ll be working very closely with the local community, of course, also bringing in a lot of key members from kind of the art world, the philanthropy world, to kind of really make sure that we’re going to do right by this project, and so - more to come.” It will open early next year.

The collection he will show on Friday is dedicated to his mother, 83, who will be leading the efforts at the Chinatown structure. It is inspired by the “alpha females” he said have always been at the centre of his designs but he’s now speaking to in a more sophisticated way: “What, I feel like, has always been my eternal muse, but not necessarily maybe having the language or the experience or just the ingredients to be able to kind support such an important topic.”

Whether his words seem genuine or like platitudes to you - well, that may not be something on which we can all agree. Many will assume his humanitarian focus is an attempt to distract or deflect, which he seems aware of: “Even prior to COVID, I was doing a lot of things with Chinatown,” he said. “It just didn’t have the emphasis that, like - we have to make this a consistent effort in everything.”

Of course, Wang is willing to risk negative opinion to return to fashion’s mainstream. “I feel like what I really want to focus on is the signal, not the noise,” he said. “I feel like there’s a lot more positive impact that I feel I can create by going forward than kind of staying in the past. If I’m always just held back by something that someone said or, oh, this person doesn’t deserve this, or you know, whatever, then, like, that’s just quitting.

“I feel like I have a mission and a purpose that feels so much bigger than my individual self. And that’s really what drives me. And I feel that there’s still a very - luckily I feel very blessed that there is still a strong demand for the product that we create.”

That piece is certainly true: in the two years after the scandal, his business grew almost 150 percent in China, where about 60 percent of his business is based, he told me. In fall of 2022, two China-based businesses, a venture capital fund and an apparel manufacturing investment firm, took minority investments in Wang, which was previously family-owned. The price of the Chinatown building, which he says he paid for on his own, without money from his investors, was a reported $9.5 million.

When Galliano was appointed to Maison Margiela in 2014, about three years after he was filmed making anti-Semitic tirades and fired from Dior, the thinking was that he had done penance, making amends with the Jewish community and working behind-the-scenes for other fashion designers in the role of student or unobtrusive mentor.

Then, a 2024 documentary suggested he didn’t fully recall or comprehend his wrongdoings (he didn’t realize, for example, that there had been two filmed incidents, not one). So the barometer became beauty and talent: his Spring 2024 collection was immediately canonized not just as a career high, but one of the greatest fashion shows of all time.

Anna Wintour has been a key figure in getting shunned designers (at various levels, of course) back in the mix: she was a champion of Karl Lagerfeld’s Met Gala retrospective, of Galliano and of Daniel Lee, hosting a private dinner at her home for him when he was mysteriously fired from Bottega Veneta and then reinstalled at Burberry. She did not attend Wang’s most recent show, in June 2024, because Diane Von Furstenberg was hosting a conflicting event that evening, but she attended his first post-scandal show in New York in 2023.

“Every fashion career has its highs and lows, and Alex has certainly had his share of both in his twenty-year career,” Ms Wintour wrote in an email. “New York has always been a city of new beginnings, and it makes sense as he navigates the next chapter of Alexander Wang that he’d want to return to fashion week in the city where it all began for him.”

The thing is, you can’t say that Alexander Wang’s clothes are genius or sublime. Wang was an immediate fashion darling when he launched his brand two decades ago because his clothes were fun and straightforward, with women coveting his T-shirts, jeans and sexy boots when the “model-off-duty” look was all the rage.

“We all really went along for the ride because he was flying so high and there were these really fun shows on Saturday nights,” said Nicole Phelps, the global director of Vogue Runway and Vogue Business. “It just felt like, everybody who’s anybody in fashion is at this show.”

But even before the assault allegations, his creative juices were already softening. He had spent 2012 to 2015 as the creative director at the French high fashion brand Balenciaga, where he was often dismissed as too commercial. “I think that experience was hard on him,” Ms Phelps said. “It wasn’t even a misstep. It was a three-year experiment that, you know, didn’t go the way anybody wanted.”

When he returned to the US to run his own label again full-time, Ms Phelps said the tone of the reviews changed. His high-octane shows, with productions whisking editors around town on buses that ran hours late, felt like slogs instead of a party. “People have less patience for a mid-career designer,” Ms Phelps said.

He began staging shows outside of New York Fashion Week in 2018, Wang said, “to understand, really, how do we want to manage our business in a way that feels sustainable for us?” (It is, indeed, a big deal whether you show during Fashion Week or some random month: “The truth of the matter is that it pays for designers, at every level of their business, to be a part of New York Fashion Week,” Ms Phelps said.)

While he’s had moments of flirtation with conceptual fashion, Ms Phelps said, his recent work is emphatically wearable: “He’s definitely not trying to do high fashion,” Ms Phelps said. “It feels much more - in quotes - streetwear-inflected.”

“To me it feels like this is a very long road back,” she continued, “and it’s not necessarily back from the allegations, it feels like back from the Balenciaga era.”

Wang still believes he has something to say with his clothes. “For me, it’s always been more than just product, you know? Of course, like, the product of what we do today is at the heart of articulating a story.”

But will it work?

“Fashion and fame ultimately is a business,” Yambao told me. “It’s rarely about morality. It was never about morality. It’s about utility: can this person still generate attention and sales?”

I asked Mr Yambao whether, then, it ultimately comes down to the individual consumer. “I really do think ultimately it’s down to our own personal values. To each their own. Pushing for the ecosystem to change is impossible,” he said. “But also, I personally believe in second, third, fourth chances. Fashion is about reinvention.”

The truth is that a blanket casting out lets us - the consumers, the fashion followers, even the fashion sceptics - off the hook from having a difficult and more complex conversation with ourselves and why we pay attention to the art, clothing and music that we do.

When I began to ask Wang how he evaluates the work of people like Kanye West or Woody Allen - “how do you navigate taking in the art or creativity of other people who have sort of been called out online?” - his publicist, who had until then remained mostly silent, interrupted to say that Wang wouldn’t answer. “Well, let me finish asking the question,” I said, “and you can say if you don’t want to answer, or not.”

“I’ve come to conclusions about these things in my own mind,” I said. “Do you think about them at all?”

“Signal,” he said, referring to his signal-noise dialectic. “Signal.”

“I consider each situation individually,” I said. “Maybe that’s not possible for every person. I do think it’s possible.”

“I’ll leave it at that,” he said. “I think it’s unfortunate that we live in a world that’s very black and white right now, where everyone either gets grouped in one or the other. There’s a lot in the middle and there’s a lot of context that I think people deserve to have.”

© 2025 , The Washington Post