Louis Shengtao Chen was topped the winner of the 2024 version of the Vogue China Vogue Fund final October. Since, he’s taken a step again to, as they are saying, get all his geese in a row. He stepped away from the runway for spring 2025, and put collectively a lookbook (and an excellent assortment at that). He skipped the autumn 2025 season altogether, and now he’s again to launch his first-ever pre-collection, a two-punch effort to broaden his industrial footprint and equipment up for the spring 2026 season and his return to the runway.
Chen stated that this assortment is a type of “half one” to the primary occasion coming within the fall. If that’s the case, he put collectively a slightly appetizing amuse-bouche: semi-sheer tailor-made coats in powdery pastel colours, cutesy floral separates with funky however cool askew seams and cascading ruffles, and a few fabulous multi-layered pencil skirts and slips with full godets that make them as flattering as they’re bizarre. Ditto a few balloon-hemmed skirts and trousers, its high layers sheer and the beneath ones reduce in white for a vintage-y x-ray look. In some, he’s even encapsulated strings of pearls inside.
Chen cuts a imply costume; the clear proof seen in prim and correct embroidered tea-length ball robes and skirts or sinuously reduce sheaths. The novelty this season is tailoring, a class Chen has considerably explored previously however by no means wholly dedicated to. Right here he’s made elongated waistcoats, some correct workplace trousers, and a fantastic single-button blazer.
Chen has been a very fascinating designer to comply with since his debut. His exuberant type and sometimes explosive, mind-boggling silhouettes have made him a darling of the Shanghai Vogue Week scene, but it surely typically left his followers questioning which elements of his world they’d really be capable to purchase into. This previous yr has clearly afforded him a newfound maturity—he’s saved his delightfully bizarro signature type however discovered methods of creating it commercially viable. These are cool, enjoyable garments. Ought to he make the soar to Paris in the course of the upcoming ready-to-wear season, as he’s beforehand hinted, he ought to ensure that to proceed down this path.
