Designer Han Feng, sporting a funky long skirt, bleached blonde hair and a pearl choker, joked that some of her friends never knew she could work with prints.
“Being a fashion designer in New York, I’m always struggling,” she laughed. “It’s so expensive, so I never touch prints. But working in the opera, I had everything handmade. We could play with this and that. I finally had the opportunity to work in prints.”
The prints reveal themselves beauftifully in director Anthony Minghella’s “Madame Butterfly,’’ which opens Sept. 25 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York’s Lincoln Center. Feng is in the city working on last-minute fittings for the opera. She spoke Thursday as part of a designer lecture series sponsored by the Fashion Center Business Improvement District.
Feng designed a small collection of Puccini-inspired items for fall, but her focus the past several years has been almost exclusively on the opera. Returning to Shanghai to work on “Madame Butterfly’’ after about two decades away, she made almost all of the intricate embroidery and flowers in her native China. The fabrics, however, were manufactured in London.
“I wish everything could have been made in China, but the technology was better in London,” she said. “Plus, if they needed to get more made or I wasn’t there, the production could still get the fabric.”
Working as part of a team, rather than as her own boss, was the key difference in designing costumes for the stage rather than clothing for the consumer, she said.
“We never knew where we were going or what we wanted,” she said. “We were always changing things. It was so exciting.”