Discussing upcycling, luxury fashion and the future of Dauphinette with Olivia Cheng.
Starting your own fashion brand at the age of nineteen is no easy feat. Olivia Cheng, founder of Dauphinette, created her sustainable fashion brand with only two thousand dollars while she was still a student at New York University.
Starting your own business can be scary but Cheng was not phased by the challenge. “The absolute worst thing that can happen is I learn something extracurricular from this, and I just go back to being a student,” Cheng tells Mission when discussing her mindset during the beginnings of Dauphinette. “And it is still my job,” she adds, reflecting back on almost eight years of business.
Cheng grew up in a Chicago suburb before moving to New York City for school. Fashion has always been an interest of Cheng’s, citing it as a source of confidence in her life early on and affectionately calling it a “friend.” In 2018, a year after moving to the city, she started a brand for upcycled fur and leather outerwear. Repurposing materials that already exist in the world is a hallmark of Dauphinette.
To Cheng, sustainability means “doing the most with what you can,” an ethos that she has followed since Dauphienette’s early days. According to Cheng, this resourceful mindset can be attributed to her upbringing as the daughter of Asian immigrants where she was taught to appreciate what she had rather than spend money on new items such as clothing.
Fruits, flowers and bugs preserved in resin have become distinctive identifiers of Dauphinette pieces. “I really have always been very attached to the natural world,” Cheng shares. Taking elements of the natural world and turning them into wearable designs further attests to Cheng’s commitment to sustainability.
During the design process, Cheng often finds that she lets the materials dictate her final product. Many traditional and technically trained designers begin their process with a sketch, or some sort of physical representation of their design idea. While Cheng begins her design process in the same way, she quickly lets the materials she is using speak for themselves. “We’re working so much with found objects, natural materials, things that have a mind and a life of their own,” she says. “It is not possible to get exactly what you want, so you might as well let the materials have a say.” The materials available to her in a given season are paramount to her designs and thus the final product often differs from her original idea. By the end of her design process “there ends up being parts of the collection that you started with and kind of stragglers that you picked up along the way. Sometimes, those things end up being the most impactful,” she says.
Cheng is committed to advocating and pushing for upcycling to have a stable place within the luxury market and vernacular. Thrifting and upcycling has become more and more popular, specifically amongst younger generations, and Cheng is working to have this trend infiltrate the luxury space specifically.
Through the years of Dauphinette, Cheng has achieved many feats. She has been featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art twice now, once in their In America: A Lexicon in Fashion exhibit where she was the youngest designer to showcase her work, and more recently in their Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion exhibit. Being featured at the MET has given Cheng the opportunity to showcase her work beyond the fashion world. “The Costume Institute is not just for people who are fans of fashion or emerging brands. It’s for everybody, even just tourists who are passing through New York and they want to see what’s new and what’s fun at the MET.”
Most recently, Cheng won the second annual CFDA and Genesis House AAPI Design and Innovation Grant. The iniative supports emerging AAPI designers, a demographic unrepresented within the fashion industry. Cheng believes one of the biggest benefits of the grant is the friendships that have formed between her and the other designers also awarded. “When you start a small business in general it can be isolating, so to have that kind of camaraderie around you and to feel the warmth in that room and the support is really exceptional,” she explains.
“My focus right now is the experience of the brand and also the people within it,” Cheng says when discussing her goals for Dauphinette and its future. She recently renewed the lease on her flagship store in the West Village and wants to perform renovations in order to create a unique brand experience and environment. Cheng loves retail and hopes to open another store one day.
She is also currently working on preparing a show for September. By the time September rolls around, Cheng will not have done a show in a year and a half. She recalls that she used to show twice a year, aligning with the New York fashion week schedule, something that posed a challenge for her as a small designer. With her time off from fashion weeks, she has reflected on how to make a show both possible and feasible for Dauphinette. For her new collection, she also hopes to stay true to the materials that Dauphinette has used since its founding. “I kind of go back into this process with a renewed sense, I think that in many ways I’m kind of back where I started. I’m really thinking a lot about upcycled fur and leather in this conversation,” Cheng finishes.
All imagery courtesy of Dauphinette.
