In 1983, Susan Casden was living in Hong Kong and leafing through the pages of a fashion magazine when she chanced upon a photo of a dress from Chanel’s most recent haute couture collection – a black, silk, crepe, floor-length gown in a sculpted silhouette.
The model, Karl Lagerfeld muse Inès de la Fressange, looked like she was wearing layers of neck and cuff jewellery and a gilt chain belt. But the dress was called “Trompe l’Oeil” – a style of visual illusion – for a reason. The hefty jewels were part of the gown’s substantial embroidery, hand-beaded and draped to look like they were fluid and in sync with every nuance of the body.
“That was my dream dress,” Casden says. “I wasn’t a couture buyer in 1983. I was very young and having kids. But that dress always stayed in the back of my mind.”
In the early 2000s, as Casden was starting to cement her rise as one of Paris couture’s most beloved patrons, she asked the people at Chanel if they could delve into their ateliers and recreate that 1983 dress for her. They said that as long as they could find every bead and crystal, exactly as it was on that first runway outing, they could. It took them six months. Close to two decades on from first seeing the Trompe L’Oeil, Casden finally got her dream dress.
Casden was once Susan Fung, wife of Tony Fung Wing-cheung, scion of Hong Kong financial services firm Sun Hung Kai & Co. She lived in Hong Kong from 1978 to 1994, during which she describes her lifestyle as that of a “tai tai” (a wealthy married woman who doesn’t work).
“It was very social,” she says. “I had a great group of friends that was very cosmopolitan. It was an exciting time to be there.”
She was involved with the Asian Cultural Council, and was an early advocate for Hong Kong’s Chinese International School; her firstborn son was one of its earliest students.
Casden may have left Hong Kong in the mid-1990s, but she has enduring ties with the city. When we meet in September in the Polo Lounge of Los Angeles’ Beverly Hills Hotel, a block away from the home she shares with her retired real-estate magnate husband Alan Casden, she had just returned from several weeks in the city (and a wedding anniversary celebration in the Maldives). Her two sons with Fung live in Hong Kong, and so she has plenty of reasons to visit.
She was also readying to accompany her husband and some friends on an African safari, while simultaneously packing up her mansion for an imminent move to the state of Arizona.
In the midst of all this, Casden was also having to decide about which pieces from her substantial haute couture collection she would keep, and which she would donate to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute; she has hosted a dinner with Friends of the Costume Institute annually for several years.
Her collection, which she shyly concedes as numbering in the hundreds, has been growing in size since she attended her first haute couture show in Paris in 2000 – an intimate couture show at Chanel’s Rue Cambon salon. She and her husband returned to Paris regularly thereafter, and each time she would pick out a piece or two from either her beloved Chanel, or Jean-Paul Gaultier, or Givenchy.
She connects with the intrinsic beauty of a couture item, whether a simple jacket or magnificent gown, and won’t talk about it unless someone asks her.
The philanthropist and socialite concedes that she wasn’t especially aware of high fashion until she moved to Hong Kong. She was born in Ridgecrest, California – a city most people may have never heard of it until it was struck by major earthquakes earlier this year.
When she was a teenager, her father, a petroleum executive, was transferred to Vietnam and then Singapore, with the family in tow. She returned to the US for university, and on a trip back to Singapore, had a layover in Hong Kong.
She met Tony Fung on a blind date at the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club during her stopover. It was 1978. They got married in Hong Kong City Hall a year later. She never finished university, with her time as a Hong Kong socialite and active member of the charity circuit beginning in earnest.
“Hong Kong was one of the places where I never wore jeans,” she says. “Everyone was always dressed up. It was always formal there, men in coats and ties. People don’t believe it when I tell them. Now, casualisation is everywhere, including Hong Kong.”
She and Fung later divorced, after which she chose to return to California on the back of a conversation with the then-principal of the Chinese International School, who told her about the illustrious Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, noting that Fung’s older son would be a perfect candidate for it.
She met Alan Casden at a Harvard-Westlake school event – his two sons were also students there – and they married in 1999.
When her older son went off to college, the Casdens went to Paris for her “first foray into the couture shows”.
“It was nerve-racking,” she says. “I didn’t know anybody. It was a bit intimidating.” Predictably, she loved just about everything in the array of couture confections being paraded in front of her.
“I had to choose something I thought would work for me,” she says.
In the end, she went for an elegant four-piece women’s tuxedo of sorts, comprising a classic black jacket with a sequinned lining and a lace skirt trimmed with feathers.
“I’ve worn that jacket so many times,” she says. “I’ve mixed up the pieces in so many ways. It’s very versatile. We went [to Paris] every January and July and we really enjoyed it. Couture is the ultimate. My husband and I had a big social life when he was in business and I kept all the pieces I ever bought. But that’s going to change soon.”
She has earmarked about 10 pieces for the Met, many from Chanel, but also a red and gold duchesse satin dress from Alexander McQueen’s last ready-to-wear collection; it was one of 16 that he created which he never finished before taking his life in 2010.
“I had the foresight to order it because they ended up not completing the orders,” Casden says. “I’ve never worn that dress in public. It’s preserved.”
Her commitment to the artistry of couture has endeared her to designers, and her love of fashion as an art form has bestowed her with numerous happy memories.
There was the exquisite Chanel haute couture gown, emblazoned with camellias, that she wore to her son’s wedding.
Or the time she worked closely for months with Hong Kong designer Barney Cheng for a dress for the Met gala, designed to be worn with a diamond jewellery suite inspired by dragons from Cartier. (She ended up not attending the gala for personal reasons, but wore the dress for the 2016 LACMA Art + Film Gala in Los Angeles.)
“Barney studded real jewels onto the dress,” she says. “It was so stunning.”
In 2017, Dolce & Gabbana asked Casden – as well as her 30-year-old daughter Alyssa Fung – to model in its Milan runway show.
Casden says she once waited five years for an Hermès Kelly bag made from a rare prized leather. As a result of her enduring relationship with the house of Hermès, she has her own perfume, specially made by them for her, several bottles of which are sent to her every year. The top note is leather.
All Casden’s couture pieces are assiduously catalogued and kept in a temperature-controlled environment on a separate floor of her home. Every time she wears one, she notates where and how.
Choosing what stays with her and what goes to the Met has been challenging, she says, because it will mark the first time her collection will be “broken up” – some to the museum, others to be put into storage in her new home city of Phoenix.
She is also ruthlessly pragmatic about the scope of wearing haute couture in Phoenix, where she may get involved with the Phoenix Art Museum and similar establishments.
“I’m not sure what I want to do at this point,” she says. “I may just take up golf.”
But before hitting the greens, she does have some critical decisions to make about her couture collection.
“When I look at them, I’ll miss them,” she says. “It’s kind of emotional. It’s really quite a collection.”
What she won’t lose though are the memories. Even after that “Trompe l’Oeil” dress that first caught her eye in 1983 was finally sent to her, it took her a long time to wear it.
“I always wanted to, but was waiting for a special occasion,” she says.
She finally got it – at Karl Lagerfeld’s memorial service earlier this year (Lagerfeld had designed the dress for his first Chanel collection).
“It was the only time I’ve ever worn it,” she says. “It was very emotional. For me, that is still the ultimate dress.”
