Chalk it up to Bella Hadid’s widely documented cowboy era or its influence circulation Cover-certified horse girls Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner, but something about strutting around in leather fringe and cowboy boots has won the hearts of fashion-minded twenty-somethings.
At face value, Mark Gong’s spring collection shows that he has seen this trend coming. But in fact, Gong was a pioneer. It was in 2019 that she first considered the cowgirl theme, and this season she gave it a fresh take. “I was talking with my friends and I said I would like to do it again,” he said. Impetus was a movie night that featured the 1991 Ridley Scott film Thelma and Louise,
I know it’s not a movie about cowboys,” Gong said, explaining that he was attracted to the rebellious, independent energy of its main characters, two defining traits of what he calls his “Gong Girls. It also, she said, led her to look at the American West from a more feminine perspective, rather than the male perspective with which she had designed that first relationship.
They mostly pulled it off, funny but mostly just unnecessary with the exception of the rearview mirror and the police siren bra top – which were actually designed in collaboration with women-led jewelery design studio Yavumin. Other models carried gas pumps and wore exceptionally tall thigh-high boots with their ruffled and ruffled dresses.
Some of the fun leather pencil skirts and bandeau tops he created were embossed or embroidered with tooling motifs, which reappeared on his power tailoring and low stacked heel boots (“Young women are less interested in high heels!”). They also showed off T-shirts and jeans and cargo pants, and unveiled an extension of their ongoing Nike collaboration. Together it became an iconic, commercial collection, charmingly packaged as an entertaining story. Overall, Gong is proving to be one of Shanghai’s most accomplished designer-businessmen.
