The dresses are the easy part to remember. Maggie Cheung’s silhouette has become inseparable from In the Mood for Love: poised, precise, capable of making an ordinary passage through a room feel charged. But stop at the wardrobe and one of the film’s most revealing credits slips past.
William Chang was its costume designer, production designer and editor. The person helping decide what the characters wore and the spaces they occupied also helped shape how long we stayed with them. Criterion’s film credits list all three roles.
One sensibility across the frame
Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 film places Su Li-zhen and Chow Mo-wan, played by Cheung and Tony Leung, in neighbouring apartments in 1962 Hong Kong. Their discovery about their spouses brings them into a delicate relationship. The premise is intimate; the surrounding world makes that intimacy difficult.
Chang’s overlapping responsibilities offer a way to think about the film’s coherence without reducing it to a colour palette. A garment is seen against a wall, beside another person, for a particular length of time. Costume, space and editing are experienced together even when the credits separate them.
That coherence belongs to a collaboration. Wong and cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin are essential to it. Chang’s overlapping credits reveal another connection: the same sensibility working on the textures before the camera and the rhythm that carries them past us.
Privacy was never part of the floor plan
In a 2025 Sight and Sound interview, Wong connected the film’s environment to childhood memories of shared Hong Kong flats. The characters were invented, he explained, but the crowded social world came from memory. Neighbours could not easily be ignored. His account makes the pressure of proximity explicit.
That changes the meaning of elegance. Looking composed can become a public task when your private life is so available to other people. The beauty of a dress need not signal freedom. It can sharpen the tension between a carefully maintained exterior and feelings that have nowhere uncomplicated to go.
The cut is part of the costume
Wong also described repetition as a way of giving familiar images altered emotional meaning. And he reaffirmed his decision to leave out material filmed for the project, including scenes that would have made the relationship more explicit.
Those choices suggest why a still image cannot contain the film’s effect. A costume is remembered through its returns and departures, through what comes before a glimpse of it and what the film declines to show afterwards. The image gains force from the time around it.
A collaborator beyond one masterpiece
The Hong Kong Film Archive’s profile traces Chang’s earlier work in textiles and fashion, and his long collaboration with Wong across films including As Tears Go By, Happy Together and 2046. His career resists a narrow division between dressing an image and constructing a film.
That is what makes revisiting his credits rewarding. The famous look is not merely something to collect on a mood board. It belongs to a larger act of storytelling, in which a dress, a room and a pause can be working on the same secret.