On the cover of Labelhood’s fall 2024 zine is a design using an uber-sized gray coat, an analysis of the standard tangzhuang, covered in a complex Chinese flower pattern rendered in silver embroidery. That very same piece can be seen at Labelhood’s title exhibit at the Rockbund Art Museum, and it closed AO Yes’s fall 2024 runway program this previous Thursday.
Each SHFW, Labelhood, the independent designer incubator, hosts an arts and culture celebration in tandem with its own program sub-calendar, which sits within the bigger Fashion Week umbrella. The Labelhoood display consists of whatever from shopping stalls, to food and beverage stands, together with a number of thematic exhibits, which are hosted at the museum beside their designer display room. The celebration’s overarching style this season was a “go back to credibility.”
In the consequences of the pandemic, China’s brightest style skills have actually re-embraced their roots, providing a “modern”– in Western terms– spin, and the regional market has actually accepted right back. A pattern that started with subtle nods to Chinese custom in ready-to-wear, has actually considering that become its own fully-fledged design, ending up being a promisingly lucrative company proposal in the area and beyond. Austin Wang and Yangson Liu’s AO Yes is among the emerging labels presently at the leading edge of this wave.
Established in 2022 by Wang, a previous style editor at Style China, and Liu, a graduate from Tokyo’s Bunka Fashion College, AO Yes analyzes Eastern culture and its conventional visual appeals to reappraise them through an advanced and contemporary lens. For fall, Wang and Liu thought about the concept of knowledge, looking more especially at the word Sensei. The East Asian honorific methods “instructor,” and is utilized to describe individuals of authority or who have actually accomplished a specific level of achievement. “This collection has to do with the modern-day intellectual,” stated the designers at a display room go to, discussing that they wished to craft a picture of the advanced and informed individuals these days. “They are who we call Sensei,” they stated.
Wang and Liu cut a sharp double breasted coat to couple with broad pants made in wool suitings and herringbones, which were lined in lavish Chinese jacquards and cuffed to highlight their fabric amalgamation of East-meets-West sophistication. They curtained fringy half-scarves into the corsets of sweatshirts and gowns, and used Wang’s signature calligraphic illustrations as graphes of their modern Senseis. Their signature shape, a hybrid of a tangzhuang and a pleated skirt, was here made as a coat and used open over short-shorts and a white t-shirt for both males and females. It was equivalent parts attractive and cerebral, as were the duo’s customized sheaths cut with high collars and robe shoulders, which brought the comparable attraction of a slinky bodycon gown for today’s sapiosexual.