Throughout 2023, Fang Guo traveled to Berlin four times. Drawn to its thriving techno scene and bonny brutalist architecture, the designer behind Brooklyn-based knitwear label FANG adopted the German capital as something akin to a second home. Guo used the city as his escape from the hustle and bustle of his base in New York — and when it came time to start mapping out the themes for his Fall/Winter 2024 collection, it became his chief inspiration.
Guo presented that collection in February, taking over a sprawling room at the W Hotel Times Square for a special “fashion week dinner” of passed-around hors d’oeuvres and signature cocktails. The designer has been working with the luxury hotel chain since last June (“They realized they wanted to draw the cool kids in,” he jokes), and their penthouse suite served as the ideal backdrop for FANG’s latest selection of clothes. Much like German architecture, these pieces playfully mashed together elements of the hard and the soft — blacks accented with chrome; plushy knits toughened up with dangly carabiners; delicate lace offset by gritty leather.
When we speak, it’s been exactly a week since that night and the designer is still on a high, though a tad exhausted. The two of us are sitting at a table in his Dumbo studio, which is shockingly organized for the headquarters of a business largely run by a small team. Guo, nursing a mason jar full of hot tea, says he hasn’t been in the space long but immediately fell in love with its large windows. As a queer person-of-color making clothes for his community, he’s also enjoyed being so close to other brands that share his vision. The building is also home to the studio of Kingsley Gbadegesin, the queer Black designer behind K.NGSLEY.
Born in Beijing, Guo’s earliest fashion memories are of his mother, who would regularly drag him along for her frequent excursions to the city’s Silk Market. There, she’d sift through racks and racks of deadstock from high-end labels like Calvin Klein and Escada. “I got a lot of my sense of aesthetics and beauty from just looking at her model, trying on all these [clothes],” he says fondly.
He found himself in America first as part of a high school foreign-exchange program, then again when he enrolled at the Academy of Art University to study fashion. Once in San Francisco, Guo wasted no time immersing himself in the vibrant vintage thrifting culture of Haight-Ashbury, but he was often frustrated by the limited range of traditional mens sportswear, which never flattered his smaller frame. For a while, he’d tailor almost everything to his specifications, but “spending $50 tailoring a $50 t-shirt” became unsustainable. Instead, he eventually migrated over to the womenswear section. “There were just so many more silhouettes, colors, and fabric choices,” he remembers thinking. “I just had to break out of this heteronormative jail of thinking. It was like, Oh, clothing shouldn’t be gendered! If you’d like to wear something and you feel comfortable wearing it, you should just be able to.”
This philosophy would go on to become a calling card for FANG, which Guo always wanted to be “queer” in the true sense of the word. “When we thought of a ‘queer fashion brand,’ a lot of times it was the gay swimwear or underwear brands,” he says of what the market looked like several years ago. “But it’s like, how much more of that do we really want?” FANG was meant to be more representative. It’s partially why he describes it as gender-expansive, a term he argues is “a lot more inclusive” than something like unisex. “That’s kind of a passé way of saying ‘this is for both men and women.’ But we now have so many more gender identities. A lot of our customers are trans people.”
FANG was born during the pandemic. At the time, Guo, who’d been working as a publicist for a design and architecture firm, was feeling disillusioned with the monotony of his corporate 9-to-5. But in the sudden pivot from office life chaos to work-from-home ease, he’d found himself armed with an abundance of free time. He hadn’t worked in fashion since his brief stints within the industry right after college, but this seemed as good a time as any to return to his first love.
The designer had been fascinated with knitwear from the beginning. “It’s an innately soft and sheltering kind of clothing,” he explains. But it’s also very malleable. “With the construction or nature of something, [knitwear] is more site-specific. Something that fits me could fit you as well.” This versatility and adaptability was key for those early designs. In many ways, Guo served as his own muse in the beginning; he “didn’t really feel confident or beautiful” in the clothes he could buy off the rack, so he started designing pieces he’d want to wear. But the designer had been inspired by “non-stick figure models” and people like Kim Kardashian and Lizzo who had “revolutionized people’s way of looking at beauty” and was just as invested in passing on that sense of freedom to fellow LGBTQ+ people. “I just really wanted the queer community to realize it’s okay to dress in a different way versus hiding yourself” he tells me.
The first piece Guo completed was an asymmetrical mock-neck tank top. (They don’t sell it anymore, though Guo hints that he might be working on an updated version for an upcoming collection.) Less than a year later, he had produced ten pieces, enough for a debut collection, and in April 2021, FANG was officially introduced to the world. That December, Guo and friends celebrated their launch with a blowout holiday party at Littlefield in Brooklyn.
That first collection netted complimentary write-ups in publications like Vogue, PAPER, and V Magazine. But three years on, Guo is still surprised by just how much his brand has become an industry player. Though much of FANG’s business comes directly from its online store, Guo’s pieces are also stocked in several shops across New York (and even one in Texas). The designer has long been committed to the traditional fashion week calendar, rolling out two collections every year. Doing so is taxing for a label still in its infancy, but Guo and his team have found the “right cadence” for production; while touring me through the studio, he laughs about the fact that, even though I’m here to discuss the just-debuted Fall/Winter collection, several pieces intended for September’s Spring/Summer line are already scattered about.
Still, as FANG has grown, Guo has been forced to contend with the reality that the brand’s gender-expansive vision is “still a little bit ahead of its time, in a sense” — at least from a traditional retail perspective. “It’s been a learning curve,” he admits. “Just selling the brand as a ‘menswear’ brand to some of these old-school enterprise retailers, they were just like, ‘What is this?’” He takes a second to recount a situation, from last October, when he showed a lookbook featuring two male models (amongst an otherwise woman-only cast) to buyers during Shanghai Fashion Week. He was told they didn’t want to see that at all. “They just don’t understand and don’t want to see it, which is why a lot of them are not doing so well, because of their archaic way of separating menswear and womenswear. It’s not how people shop anymore.”
Like the knitwear he designs, though, Guo is quite adaptable. Now, for each collection, FANG shoots two different campaign lookbooks, one featuring models of all genders and another featuring only women. The former is how Guo truly sees his brand while the latter is only pulled out for some of the less adventurous buyers. As you can imagine, watering down his vision can feel like a compromise or cop-out. But as he acknowledges, “While you can be a martyr and try to persuade people of your vision, sometimes, you have to just work around it.” Besides, it has helped. “They at least respond to me now,” he jokes. “They used to not even do that.”
Luckily, the designer can already see the larger industry bending toward his will. Recalling a recent conversation with the buyer for Phoenix-based designer boutique /NOW OR NEVER, Guo tells me, “They were like, ‘Oh, we’re completely getting rid of our men’s vs. women’s sections in the future.’” Urban Outfitters, he informs me, now employs buyers specifically looking for non-gendered brands. (The designer has been preparing for an upcoming meeting with them.)
And as his binary-breaking designs find their proper audience, Guo has been taking stock of what his customers want. The brand’s accessibly priced Essential Ribbed Tank, for one, is a “signature piece” that Guo enjoys reinventing season after season. But customers have also been gravitating towards some of FANG’s more upscale offerings, ponying up cash for his delicate sheer pieces (excellent for layering) and for the Pointelle Loop Top (an early hit).
But Guo has a Master’s degree in Communications and knows that any growing brand needs an array of items at different price points, which is why you’ll find a plethora of FANG-branded accessories, from keychains to necklaces to socks and underwear. His first love will always be knitwear, but lately, he’s been pouring time into finding his brand’s “hero” piece. “We’ve spent a year trying to develop a handbag that’s truly iconic,” he teases. “It’s trial and error.”
For Guo, the end game would be opening a brick-and-mortar FANG boutique. “No matter what sort of wholesale opportunities we have, eventually, it’s a brand’s dream to really have their own presence,” he says. In the meantime, he’d love to just stage a real runway show. Having talked with designers like Private Policy duo Haoran Li and Siying Qu, Guo is aware of the burden (both financial and emotional) of producing one. Nevertheless, the “sheer production value” and “theatricality” of the shows he sees in markets like Paris continue to mesmerize him. “Working in this industry, a lot of times we’re jaded, and it’s like, ‘Oh…another [runway],’” he says. “But when someone actually puts on a great show, they can leave a really long-lasting impression.”
Judging by everything on Guo’s plate, however, it seems that FANG has already made quite the lasting impression without the added fanfare. Earlier, as he toured me through the studio, Guo stopped us at a table strewn with papers he’d later reveal to be drafts for designs he’d been working on for a collaboration with popular gay cruising app Sniffies, scheduled to drop during Pride. Sitting on a different table was a screengrab from a video game; near the end of our conversation, Guo let me know that he’d been tapped by Girl Globe, the Asian company that makes that game — soon, a selection of his designs will be available to “wear” within its digital world.
These partnerships, as well as the one with W Hotel, have been essential in the continued growth of his brand. Guo sees each opportunity as a separate avenue that can lead to a new customer, especially when he can meet people face-to-face. “We have over 30,000 Instagram followers,” Guo says at one point, “but it’s always appreciated to have these offline activations and actually talk to the community to really bring some sort of human aspect to the brand.” After all, FANG makes clothes designed to be worn out, crafted to be seen — in Berlin, New York, and beyond. It’s no surprise that Fang Guo describes his approach to design in very simple terms: “With fashion, I just really feel like, if we’re not having fun, then what are we doing here?”
Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s weekly newsletter here.
