Colour. That’s the first thing that you notice when you visit Everett Wong’s Instagram account, Scoundrels and Gents (@scoundrelsandgents). It is hard to think of much else when you are looking at a technicolour dance of intarsia made with hot orange and vibrant pink, lime green and blue, neon yellow and grey.
The colour is the first thing that catches your attention, but then there is the exceptional technique: carefully crafted Fair Isle, Irish crochet, toile, beadwork…often mixed, and all skillfully done. A couture-level fisherman’s sweater blooming with flowers. A chunky handknit with an arresting series of shockingly bright stripes. Capelets made with extraordinary patterns. Toile and fringe with seafoam fibre. There is nothing dull here. His feed is filled with knitwear, sketches, fibre experiments, and even Ukrainian eggs, all of it vibrant, artful, and, despite the variety of media, visually cohesive.
Based in Victoria, B.C., Everett, an artist and menswear designer, grew up on Vancouver Island. He studied fine arts at Malaspina College (now Vancouver Island University) and the University of Victoria (UVic). Even in his early student days, he was drawn to textiles; especially the eccentric and fantastical.
“I’ll play with colour and process in my own way, I love the idea of bringing Asian sensibilities to a European tradition. I look to textiles as a way of analyzing the history of what we have made, and the social aspects of why we now make what we do.”
In art school he was introduced to traditional techniques in painting, drawing, and silkscreen printing. With screen printing, he found his passion, becoming obsessed with trying to recreate the patterns from vintage kimono prints.
“The Asian diasporic is a conversation that is happening now, but it didn’t exist for me at that time. At the time, I was very isolated in a very white, lower middle-class environment. There wasn’t a discussion about any kind of diversity. If you are a person of colour that has grown up in this sort of environment your whole life, you often assimilate into this society. I’m not Japanese, but I’m Chinese and Canadian, and my parents were in the war generation and were vehement against all things Japanese, saying that they had stolen a lot of things from Chinese culture. I just got obsessed with the idea of Kimono prints and taking it back for my own.”
Work title: “Gap Year Travellers,” 2017. Photo credit Everett Wong.
Work title: “Gap Year Travellers,” 2017. Photo credit Everett Wong. (Click to enlarge.)
For the culmination of his art school studies, inspired by the convergence between Japanese and Western cultures, Everett put together a graduation show with life-sized felted top hats in the tradition of Victorian millinery and fantasia but with a nod to Japan’s Meiji era, a period where the country was suddenly open to globalization.
“No one was really talking about third cultures then, but I was fascinated by it. Assimilation doesn’t happen instantly, it kind of seeps in and melds together. There was something very creepy about the hats I made, which I hung high up on a wall. They were clothes without a human body, which either denotes a commercial context, or something very morbid.”
Work title: “Looking for Brummell,” 2010. Photo courtesy of Everett Wong.
Work title: “Wonderland,” 2010. Photo credit Sean Fenzl.
Feeling limited by the constraints of critiques that often came from a white-centric, modernist male perspective, he chose to look further afield. Upon reading an article about the limited number of men in textiles at London’s Royal College of Art (RCA), he decided to take a chance and apply to their textiles program, and, to his surprise, he was interviewed within a few weeks of his application to the men’s knitwear program.
“They literally sent me my acceptance on April Fool’s’,” he said.
But Everett was well-placed at RCA; he’d been an avid hand knitter since he was thirteen, and experimentation was always in his nature.
“I wasn’t so inspired by garments,” he said, “but I loved combining yarns and colours and textures. When I was a child, my mom had these two friends who would send her things from Taipei, and I remember things like electric blue angora and red. A lot of what I did in my early experiments with kimonos was learning how colour relationships, outside of the West, exist. When you think of colour from Japan, there is an entirely different way of seeing colour.”
Everett frequently seeks “between colours,” which often do not exist in the Western context. He describes them as the colours regularly used in the background of a print, ones that are hard to describe, such as rust or eggplant.
“You try to think of those colours, but you can’t really. The eggplant is purple, but not really purple,” he says, “Navy, but not quite… but then you put a hot orange or poppy red on it, and there is a spectrum to play with.”
Work title: “Gap Year Travellers,” 2017. Photo credit Everett Wong.
The colour combinations found in China, Japan, and Korea continue to influence Everett’s work, as does his ongoing obsession with the two-dimensional drawing techniques of early manga, which bleeds into his recent designs.
“Manga was, as an animation style, very expressive for something that had a low-frame rate,” he says, explaining how studios often exaggerated features on purpose to achieve their desired technique despite the limitations of technology. “They repeated things to add dynamism, not unlike Fair Isle knitting.”
In a recent show in Victoria, Everett drew upon these techniques to make a new series of hats.
“I used giant flowers in those compositions; they were influenced by the fabric folding techniques found in Geisha culture. I thought about hair ornaments but making them more abstract and grotesque. I’m not disrespecting the tradition, but I want to push it further.”
Work title: “Henshin,” 2021. Photo credit Everett Wong.
Work title: “Henshin,” 2021. Photo credit Everett Wong. (Click to enlarge.)
And in defying traditions—but also finding them—Everett likens his work to the rise of K-pop in North America, citing the colourful nature and artifice of male K-pop stars BTS as something distinctly un-North American, but influenced none the less by Western methods in the most unexpected ways.
Everett’s current practice continues to be influenced by his fashion and art background, and a global clash of cultures. During his MFA, he took a workshop with the French haute couture embroidery house Lesage, and he saw a trunk of binders containing stitchwork samples from the past 200 years of the house.
“I thought that was a lot of history,” he said, “so now I’m looking at creating my own kind of fake archive. I love it because it is performative, and it lives in costume, which I love. Unfortunately, none of us have that kind of space to create anymore; artists no longer have giant studios, so I love the idea of playing with this dichotomy—playing with creating something very small and personal that helps to document the process, that traditionally was intended to be made in a larger textile studio or fashion house. We just don’t do this sort of detailed fashion work anymore.”
And in this experimenting with knits and upcycled fibres, Everett stays true to his personal artistic dialogue. “I’ll play with colour and process in my own way, I love the idea of bringing Asian sensibilities to a European tradition. I look to textiles as a way of analyzing the history of what we have made, and the social aspects of why we now make what we do.”
Featured photo courtesy of Everett Wong.
