With her husband Christopher Owen, Victoria Tang-Owen founded multidisciplinary design studio Thirty30 Creative, named after the couple’s ages at the time the company was established. They’ve since worked with the likes of Rosewood Hong Kong, Lane Crawford and Moynat, to name just a few clients from the studio’s extensive portfolio. In 2020, they set up a new entity, Victoria Tang Studio, offering more collaboration between brands and Tang-Owen, leading to more visibility: when brands want Tang-Owen’s personal design direction and aesthetic to be involved in the creation of a product, rather than branding for existing concepts, they go to Victoria Tang Studio.

One example of a project under Victoria Tang Studio is Dior Men’s pre-fall 2021 show, held as a virtual event. Kim Jones, artistic director for the fashion house’s menswear division, had originally planned to put on the show in Beijing—and the Chinese angle remained, despite Covid-19 rendering a physical show impossible. Jones and his team were looking for expert embroiderers; they asked Tang-Owen to lead the project from this side of the world, and source artisans on the mainland. In the end, she identified about 30 embroiderers. They brought to life the psychedelic designs of New York street artist Kenny Scharf, with whom Dior Men collaborated on this collection—the results include a stunning shirt that took 7,000 man-hours to create. “A lot of people said business was not good, everything shut down—but in fact, we had quite a busy year,” says Tang-Owen. “I think a lot of people had time to step back and say: let’s do some rebranding, and [think about] what the post-Covid situation will look like.”

Tang-Owen also serves as president of the Hong Kong Down Syndrome Association.