Angel Chang

TED Resident Instagram: @angelchang @angelchang.official Angel Chang is an American womenswear designer specializing in indigenous craftsmanship and traditional knowledge as a solution to climate change. She began her career designing for the Donna Karan Collection in New York and Chloé (See by Chloé) in Paris. Her first eponymous label (2006 – 2008) incorporated smart textiles into hi-tech garments and received several accolades including the Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation Award and the Cartier Women’s Initiative Award. Disillusioned by technology’s unfulfilled promise for innovative textiles, she sought to understand the future of clothing better by studying the ancient past. So in 2012, Angel moved to a remote mountain village in Guizhou province, rural China, to learn the traditional fabric-making techniques still practiced there by the Miao, Dong, and Buyi tribes. Following in the footsteps of her ancestors going back 14 generations, she rediscovered her ancestral roots and the plant dyes used in traditional Chinese medicine. As a TED Speaker and Smithsonian Artist, Angel now speaks to global audiences about fashion, climate change, and indigenous knowledge. As a NEST Professional Fellow and Member of the Artisan Alliance, she provides design expertise to artisan groups around the world. Her work has been collected by The Museum at FIT and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. She received an MA in Modern Art from Columbia University, and BA cum laude in Art History & Visual Arts from Barnard College in New York City. TED Talk: How ancient textiles can help the future https://bit.ly/TEDtalkAC TED-ed lessons: The life cycle of a t-shirt https://bit.ly/TEDt-shirt The wildly complex anatomy of a sneaker https://bit.ly/3wjvC83

Climate solutions + designing for a zero-carbon future. Traditional craftsmanship. Pre-industrial design. Indigenous knowledge. Sustainable living. Meditation. Hiking. Being in Nature 24 hrs a day.

Fashion is one of the largest global polluters and contributes up to 10% of greenhouse gas emissions. Indigenous knowledge can help us find more sustainable ways of making clothing for the future. Working with indigenous artisans in remote mountain villages, my womenswear collection ANGEL CHANG shows how we can make natural, zero-carbon clothing without the use of electricity or fossil fuels. My TED Talk: https://bit.ly/TEDtalkAC

Higher states of consciousness