Xander Zhou again dropped out of the runway this season, selecting a digital release, but it did not stop the Beijing-based designer from closing the Shanghai Fashion Week on the first night of the show. In the last season, Jhou premiered a collection video in a screening-cum-party in the system, now the Defunk Club Space that was the city’s fashion week’s favorite. This time he leaned to the same community -with some international friends -to tease his fall lineup on social media. Jhou shared the preview images of the lookbook with her friends, asking them to share them in two hours, before he released photos.
The idea behind this “interaction”, Jhou explained, was to allow people to offer their interpretations of their collection before launch, so it would “take many versions of themselves online.” Whatever he was doing in his specific philosophical style, he was interrogating our collective relationships with perception and how it has been replaced by technology. Dharna, Zhou argues, is no longer limited by biological functions. It is straightforward as a filter applied to a photo on social media from artificial intelligence to online information and even something from online information. Does the reality still exist as we know when it can be adjusted, rebuilding, and reorganized in our whimm?
True to form, Jhou’s seasonal dispatch included a strong doseer of research and its own meta principles. They always make a complicated, ideological reading. Still equally or perhaps more compelling than their room on technology and the way it affects our experience in the world is the sewing machines of Jhou. “From the very beginning I decided that I wanted to make a collection made of a fully suit,” he said, “I wanted to detect a system with a certain structure and see how far I can move forward within that frame.”
Each of Jhou’s uniform extracts began with the same knit on which he laid down the rave-red platform boots, military-inspired bands, and finally, fanky shirting interpretations and an array of really magnificent jackets. The fashion pendulum has once again swung in the side of the dress, and the men’s jacket had some most interesting and novels of Jhou’s Refs season. Standouts included a lapel in a vampiric collar on a navy single breasted jacket or a spiked panel on one side through one slash on the other to another. They also moved the folding point of a lapel to the chest and fixed it with a button, and applied a hood -like pocket to another silhouette. 93 looks, there is definitely a lot of pars. Jhou knows how to build speed and maintain care, but he could still do with a tight editing.
“I was not trying to re -organize clothes,” he insisted, “I kept asking myself, how can I take away the re -assigned tasks of these elements and give them a new, even the objectives or forms to be invented so far?” He completed this. Zhou is a rare designer whose tangible output talks more ideological. He was remarkable in this season. It is expected that next time he will manage to return to the runway – Shanghai Fashion Week Benefits from his presence.
