Xander Zhou ventured off the runway once more this season, choosing a digital launch, however this didn’t forestall the Beijing-based designer from kicking off Shanghai Vogue Week on the primary night time of exhibits. Final season Zhou premiered a set video at a screening-cum-party at System, the now defunct membership area that was a favourite of town’s Vogue Week contingent. This time round he leaned on the identical neighborhood—plus some worldwide pals—to tease his fall lineup on social media. Zhou shared preview photos of the lookbook together with his friends, asking them to share them within the two hours earlier than he launched the pictures himself.
The thought behind this “interplay,” defined Zhou, was to permit individuals to supply their very own interpretations of his assortment earlier than the launch, so it might “tackle a number of variations of itself on-line.” What he was getting at, in his typical philosophical type, was interrogating our collective relationship with notion and the way it’s been altered by expertise. Notion, Zhou argues, is now not restricted by organic features. It’s aided and altered by the whole lot from synthetic intelligence to data on-line and even one thing as simple as a filter utilized to a photograph on social media. Does actuality nonetheless exist as we all know it when it may be adjusted, reconstructed, and recalibrated to our whim?
True to type, Zhou’s seasonal dispatch included a sturdy file of analysis and his personal meta theories. They at all times make for an intriguing, thought-provoking learn. But equally or maybe much more compelling than his ruminations on expertise and the best way it continues to affect our expertise on this planet are Zhou’s tailoring machinations. “From the very begin I made a decision I needed to create a set composed solely of fits,” he mentioned, “I needed to discover a system with a hard and fast construction and see how far I might push variation inside that body.”
Every of Zhou’s uniform extrapolations started with the identical knit onesie over which he positioned rave-ready studded platform boots, military-inspired bands, and, finally, funky shirting interpretations and an array of actually implausible jackets. The style pendulum has swung in favor of dressiness as soon as extra, and Zhou’s riffs on the boys’s jacket had been a few of the most fascinating and novel of the season. Standouts included the best way he turned a lapel right into a vampiric collar on a navy single breasted jacket or how the closure of one other consisted of a sharp panel on one facet piercing by means of a slash on one other. He additionally moved the folding level of a lapel as much as the chest and glued it with a button, and utilized a hoodie-like pocket to a different silhouette. At 93 seems to be, there’s definitely heaps to parse by means of. Zhou is aware of the right way to construct momentum and retain consideration, however he nonetheless might have carried out with a tighter edit.
“I wasn’t attempting to deconstruct the clothes,” he insisted, “I stored asking myself, how can I strip away reassigned features of those parts and provides them a brand new, even yet-to-be-invented function or type?” This he completed. Zhou is the uncommon designer whose tangible output walks his extra conceptual discuss. He was in outstanding type this season. Hopefully subsequent time he’ll handle to get again on the runway—Shanghai Vogue Week advantages from his presence.
