Fashion Week: Five minutes with Monika Chiang

amNewYork caught up with designer Monika Chiang to get the scoop on her fall 2013 collection.

How would you describe your collection in one word?
Powerful.

What was your inspiration for fall?
Flight. I have the recurring dream in which I am running and running until I take off into flight. I think that was the initial inspiration, and then I visited this exhibition at MoMA that had all these photographs of birds in flight.

How does that translate to your collection?
I was really thinking about the viewpoint of looking down over everything and the shapes that birds make with their wings. So you'll see a lot of graphic shapes and billowing panels in the collection to mimic those elements.

What's most notably new this season?
We've been working with all these really cool bonded fabrics, like wool bonded to cotton or wool bonded to neoprene.

Who is your dream customer?
I just want to create clothes that people love. A couple of weeks ago, I saw a woman here in New York wearing one of my coats and I got such a charge out of it. I also probably seemed like a crazy person because I followed her trying to get a good picture with my phone.

Showing Feb. 8 at Lincoln Center