Mark Gong’s QR code invite on WeChat was a mocked-up dating app match. Once we got inside his Labelhood hosted show every guest—including Simon Porte Jacquemus, who is passing through Shanghai—found a pair of pink fluffy handcuffs had been left on their seat. Gong seemed to be nursing an itch that urgently required scratching. He said: “I’ve been single for two years! So this is a very personal collection… all my friends call me ‘I’ve Got Issues’.”
I’ve Got Issues said he is still on the apps, and from the sounds of it looking for love in all the wrong places. But this collection was also (if not more so) a fashion articulated prowl for the more transiently physical rewards of romance. The designer said his particular inspiration for the season was Sabrina Carpenter: “She’s amazing. She’s spicy. She’s ok to make fun of herself. And also to meet her desire, and say ‘I want men.’ I just think that’s really cool. So I really want to create a woman who’s daring to love what she likes to love.”
Gong’s women walked here and there around a many roomed apartment which was coincidently colored not far off the lavender of Jacquemus’s spring 2020 Provence meadow. Instead of being on the hunt for someone to devour, these characters seemed to be taking a breath between courses in a session already started: they sometimes held the fur-edged collars of their knit cardigan-jackets to their chest to prevent the garment slipping back off, and the skin visible around bralettes, skirts, knits, and furs was often reddened with the puckered lipstick print of passionate kisses.
This was hot stuff. White lace skirts came printed with ‘Situationship’ in scarlet Goth font at the tush. Gong was working to express desirousness as much as desirability: he explored 50 shades of both sides of that coin in a 50 look collection that featured skirts with inbuilt garter belt fastenings, fit and flare utility skirts, drop waisted organza ball skirts, decadently frizzy fur coats, fur detailings galore, lattice lace kinky boots, heeled pilgrim loafer-pumps, bumster micro hot pants, front gathered and fitted ikat floral jacquard dresses, lace-edged wool pencil dresses, and trailing pom-pom accessories.
Carpenter’s sweetness, said the designer, had informed a softening adjustment to the usual toughness of his design vocabulary that was applied via those florals, as well as experiments in cutesy color and embellishment. “I want the show to taste like sugar,” he said, “but also to make you wonder as you taste that sugar whether its flavor is hiding a razor blade.” In today’s righteous fashion landscape, horniness is a topic too fraught with potential pitfalls to be regularly flirted with. But Gong turned it on tonight.
