Dauphinette’s Olivia Cheng is known for her use of unconventional materials in design. This season, she used real croissants (in anti-mold coating) dusted with crystal embellishments as purses. She’s crafted dresses from human hair. The Met even commissioned a dress made from daisies pressed in resin for its 2021-2022 exhibition In America: A Lexicon of Fashion. In fact, flowers have informed a great deal of her work in fashion. A self-dubbed outsider (at least initially) in the industry, Cheng explains, “I think that having more of a curious and outsider interest in fashion, in terms of how materials could be regarded, specifically with botanicals and flowers and fruits and vegetables, really allowed me to have any type of career in fashion. So I'm very grateful to the flowers.”
Courtesy of NYBG
Courtesy of NYBG
The New York Botanical Garden tapped Cheng, alongside Hillary Taymour of Collina Strada and Kristen Alpaugh of FLWR PSTL, to design this year’s The Orchid Show: Florals in Fashion, open from February 17 through April 21, 2024, in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. NYBG held its annual dinner at The Plaza last Thursday to toast the exhibit, raising crucial support for its global plant research, conservation, and education initiatives (Guerlain sponsored the evening). For the orchid show, they assigned Cheng five mannequins to adorn.
She was aware of the irony of her role as she presented her ideas: “I, having no horticulture background, barely able to keep an orchid alive—by barely, I mean unable.”
Her job was to spotlight the orchids—Dendrobium, Laelia Superbiens, Lady Slippers, and more niche varieties—hundreds of which are planted around said mannequins. “The idea wasn't necessarily for me to use orchids in my work directly, but to create this sartorial landscape—greenscape, if you will—that orchids could really be highlighted within,” she says. Probing beyond orchids, she employed arid and grass plants, “things that I felt like would be a bit tongue-in-cheek and offset the grandeur and the beauty that is so succinct and natural to orchids and orchid shows.”
Cheng notes that in addition to feeling lucky to be asked, she also felt the decision made sense. These flowers are live instead of being made out of wood pulp, which she used for the floral pieces in her Fall 2023 collection. But, no stranger to unorthodox mediums, Cheng didn’t feel a seismic difference in shifting her skills to the horticultural space. The only distinction? Her runway shows don’t need to be hosed down on a regular basis.