The Tamesis
WB Yeats’s phrase “perne in a gyre” in his poem “Sailing to Byzantium” captures the greatest fashion-related theory. He sees history unfolding like a spinning spool in a spinning mill, a conical spiral like DNA: everything repeats itself ad infinitum, but with infinite microscopic variation.
This is also the theme of Susan Fang’s collection this season. She said: “History seems to be repeating itself. We think about infinity, but it’s in the shape of a cycle… Ever since we grew up, we’ve been taught to work hard towards this goal – a bit like this capitalist world – but now I feel like there’s a lot of challenges in our world. There’s a lot of sad things happening. So we wonder if it’s time to question what’s causing this.”
This basic principle allows Fang to jump back and forth in history, drawing silhouettes from the 19th, mid-20th, and 21st centuries. She also moved between various backgrounds, showing off bridal-leaning looks and tutus, echoing daywear swathed in ski material with sculpturally arranged down-filled panels. What ties them together is the lovely, slightly sweet emotion she seeks to convey through the opaque lightness of chiffon, tulle and resin materials, as well as the pastel color story and generous use of decorative touches in the shape of lucky clover flowers, peach blossoms and bows to create an ethereal aesthetic.
The most eye-catching bow sat giant on the head of a model wearing a dress made of resin butterflies connected by threads, designed to flutter around her body as she walked, which Fang said took more than a month to create. Combined with Fang’s 3D-printed ballet slippers, convex-soled jelly, and the commercial EDM breakdown played on the show, it reminded me of mid-Prom Vegas: kawaii sci-fi. This cleverly conceived collection offers plenty of possibilities for Fang’s followers to incorporate into their future wardrobes.
