A community magazine showcasing extraordinary foreign talent in America
Fey Fey Worldwide takes off, finding inspiration in air travel
4N’s production manager, Joyce Keokham, talks to Feyfey, founder of Fey Worldwide, about their Spring/Summer 2026 collection, the personas of travel, and storytelling through fashion.
Founded in 2019 between New York and London, Fey Fey Worldwide (FFW) is a fashion brand that excites underground artists and fashion enthusiasts who exist between places. Fey Fey Worldwide, like 4N, is home for those without permanent addresses.
Feyfey herself was born in China and raised in the United States after immigrating with her family. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA) and the Royal College of Art in London (MA) with the belief that clothes should be made for survival in a world of constant pressure and exchange. For Feyfey, “Garments behave like a toolset: protective and adaptive, sometimes inflated to shield and sometimes pared back to reveal. In this way, I treat fashion as both armor and language, a bold survivalist code laced with humor.”
I met Feyfey four years ago while modeling for her thesis show, Opera 101, Fashion to Suffer by. Hosted at Bungee Space, a shared stockist of both 4N and FFW, red velvet curtains lined the bookstore as a group of us models forced our way around the at-capacity space wearing FFW inflatables. Attesting to the designer’s humor, Feyfey handed me Leona Anderson lyrics which read, “Rats in my room, every day I’ve got more rats in my room...” for me to learn and lip sync before doors opened. I was directed to pretend-cry as a circus opera hysteric.
Since then, Feyfey has ventured out of inflatables to develop more ready-to-wear collections, including the FFW AW25 A Kind of Weather collection mentioned in our interview with video director Lishan Liu, as well as a t-shirt collaboration with Han Gao titled Betty, playing on the pronunciation of “bad tee.” Aligned with our sense of play here at 4N, it’s fitting that Fey Fey Worldwide has previously advertised in the magazine’s first issue.
Fey Fey Worldwide’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection Take-Off features 18 new looks with garments that include built-in neck pillows, seating cushions for long-haul flights and extra storage space presented as flattened designs. The looks are equal parts inspired by unkept passengers and seemingly perfect airline stewards. To celebrate her new collection, I met up with Feyfey to discuss her growth and inspiration behind her new works.
Joyce Keokham: In the beginning, your works were more about taking up space, but recently you’ve been producing more ready-to-wear collections. What changes in your personal life are reflected in these design shifts?
Feyfey: At first I made an inflatable collection mostly because I wanted to make sculptural garments. But thinking about moving from London back to the US, it had to be something easy to pack, so that’s how the inflatables started. Inflatables are just like a material to me. Sometimes I still think I’m making inflatables, only with cotton or wool.
JK: Naturally, your relationship with fashion has also evolved from your thesis show, Fashion to Suffer by. What is your current attitude towards fashion?
FF: I still have mixed feelings about fashion. I often feel like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill, lol. But I think I’ll probably keep doing it for a long time. I’ve learned to treat it more like a daily routine, something steady rather than heroic. These days, I see fashion as a conversation: between myself and others, between material and time. It still exhausts me sometimes, but it also keeps me curious.
JK: Your Spring/Summer 2026 collection Take Off is inspired by strangers encountered in transit. Was there a specific encounter that kicked off your inspiration for this collection?
FF: This collection first started because I had a lot of air travel last year, and the different characters going into air travel and how they dressed super differently really inspired me. But there wasn’t a specific encounter.
JK: The storytelling behind Take Off includes these characters you created, like the Major Arcana of Travel. Could you break them down for us?
FF: The Starlet is definitely first class passengers, but I have never traveled in first class so it’s just in my imagination. They would travel with super lightweight garments and luxury material and drink a lot of mini-bar.
The Sleeper is a passenger who is really tired and spends 20 hours in the terminal waiting for a layover. They always need to sleep.
The Accumulator is easy, I feel like most of my friends are accumulators. They travel with economic airlines and only get one luggage but argue that it’s enough. Then they put a lot of clothes on their body and stuff their pockets and hoodies.
The Airmailer is the most mysterious passenger. They don’t belong to city life like the others. They don’t really travel through airports anymore—maybe they hover above them, spiritually. They move lightly, as if they’ve already mailed themselves somewhere else. Their clothes always have pockets for paper, ink, sound, and wind. You can’t tell if they live in the past or the future, but their mind is always in transit—you can't keep up with them. I think of them as a little magic, like they know how to fold time into an envelope.
We were also building this scammer character…[but it didn’t make the cut.]
JK: Which character do you identify with most?
FF: I think I’m a Sleeper. While sleep is nice, the Sleeper character is more about being tired, which I relate to most when I travel. That’s me and also, like, the most common mode for people.
JK: If you had to assign these characters to astrological signs how would you split them?
FF: Oh, that’s hard. The Starlet is definitely the fire signs. The Airmailer is air signs. I think water signs can be the Accumulator and earth signs are the Sleepers.
JK: You shot your campaign at Floyd Bennett Field, New York’s first municipal airport. How did that idea come about and are there other bits of history hidden in your campaign?
FF: Working with Charm, which is my friend’s agency, we were researching different air-related locations to shoot the campaign, and we found this radio control club that flies model airplanes at the Floyd Bennett Field. Every week, the club flies their remote control airplanes there. At first we wanted to do a runway show with them. But it’s really far from the city. So we ended up just taking videos and photos over there.
JK: How did your collaboration with Charm come about? There’s many creatives in the FFW network, how do you choose which collaborators you work with for each of your collections?
FF: Charm is run by close friends, and we’d been talking about working together for a while. Our ideas about air travel and movement overlap in a natural way, so the collaboration came together.
JK: Being between places, in the earlier years of your brand building, was it ever challenging to find trusted collaborators? We recently interviewed Lishan Liu who frequently works with you–she mentioned that you guys were internet friends first.
FF: Yes, we met online. Lishan is my favorite artist to work with! We share a very similar sense of humor and both like to explore things that feel new, modern, relaxed yet uncanny. Honestly, a lot of my creative relationships started that way either online or while I was traveling. In New York it’s somehow harder to find collaborators. Everyone here tends to be very tied to a specific scene or subculture, so it’s rare to meet someone who feels open in that way.
JK: FFW is a Special Interest of 4N because your ideas are always expansive. Whether you’re presenting your clothes in the context of real estate with Apts For Rent or making a mockumentary about the fashion industry like you did with Showtime. It sometimes seems that fashion is a vehicle for your larger ideas. Was fashion always your preferred medium?
FF: I think fashion has its advantage in showcasing ideas because it’s very accessible. I can make the clothes I want, but with other mediums, it might require more time and more facilities. So I would say yes, fashion is my preferred media.
I also really like video. I think a combination of fashion and video is my most preferred but with video you need more help and more organization. I would love to do more videos in the future.
JK: Limitations make our storytelling more interesting. Like how your inflatable designs were born out of packing practicalities. Were there any parameters that influenced the Take Off collection?
FF: Yes, this collection I wanted to make everything more compact and flat—something that could fit into a carry-on suitcase. After doing the inflatable pieces, I wanted to go the opposite way, like taking the air out instead of putting it in.
JK: How did you develop your initial audience for FFW? And where do you see your consumer base growing?
FF: At first it was definitely because of the inflatable collection—it’s big and technical and catches people’s eyes. After that, things started to grow pretty organically, through friends of friends, independent stores, and people who found the clothes through the stores. I don’t know about the future, but I think it’s growing “worldwide” lol.
JK: What are you looking forward to exploring next with FFW?
FF: This collection is a pivot from my previous collections. I want to focus a lot more on the Worldwide part of Fey Fey Worldwide. So that it’s very, very worldwide. I want to do more campaigns about traveling the world and its souvenirs.