Photography and Text by Noel Zheng, Copyright 2017
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“Untitled (Post-Production)”
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A short project on nostalgic novelty in a fast-fashioned world.
For this project, I took myself out of my own comfort zone and shot the life and style of the night, and for this, what better place is there to go than Chinatown? Chinatown boasts the creative and the eclectic, the mainstream and the experimental all under its neon lights, red lamp posts and oriental pillars.
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I went out to shoot this during Philadelphia Fashion week; the week following NYFW. However, the events out of Chinatown do not seem to interfere, in any aspect, with the existence within. It is bubble in itself where experimentation and change is accepted in both their novelty, and their-otherwise-stigma. It is the one place in any city that offers a looking glass to the 10 years ahead and to the 10 years past: a place where novelty somehow intertwines with something familiar.
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Almost resembling one of the many “Cities of Desires” in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Chinatown is transient in the most familiar way; and this is what I sought out to capture. The ever-changing: less so the fashion, but more so the holistic mood these nocturnal humans evoked with their fashion: something nostalgic, yes, but also something very new.
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So, in this short series of eight images, you may see something different than he or she, or your yesterday’s self would (and tomorrow, this series may reveal itself in a different light). Regardless, these eight images prove that, sure, fast-fashion of large corporations may be taking over Milan runways or 5th Avenue sidewalks, but Chinatown has a style of its own and this style will forever be something not quite like next season’s collection, but already existing in the now, never far off.
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About The Author: Noel Zheng is a Sophomore majoring in Architecture, University of Pennsylvania, Class of 2020. To access additional articles by Noel Zheng, go here: https://tonywardstudio.com/blog/noel-zheng-creation-movement/