Liushu Lei and Yutong Jiang had the vibiest show of Shanghai Fashion Week this season thanks in large part to the thrilled sorority of Shushu/Tong girls that flocked to the Labelhood venue to see it. The core appeal of the brand seemed to be epitomized in Lei’s explanation as to why they’d called this collection The Invented Self: “She’s the kind of girl who has her own character outside of the family.”
Lei and Jiang’s collection was specifically inspired by Violette Nozière, the 1978 Claude Chabrol true-crime art house movie starring Isabelle Huppert as a 1930s teenager forced into a fatal revolt against her overbearing and abusive family. The designers took a panoply of 1930s and 1940s shapes and then applied a hyper-stylized and ultra-feminine filter that was most often expressed through the ceremonially crooked right elbow from, which in almost every look, a house handbag was hung.
Shrunken opaque cardigans, plaid pencil skirts, stirruped knee socks, ruffle edged gowns in crushed velvet that draped off the body like theater curtains framing a stage, peter pan collared swing coats, and cutely cut shift dresses were amongst the many ladylike brushstrokes with which Lei and Jang constructed the image of their heroine. As so often here in Shanghai this week, there were drop-waisted dresses and skirts as well as bows aplenty.
Although the audience was absolute proof of the appeal of these borderline costume full-look ensembles (the collection was designed to enable personal reinvention, after all), it was the outfits less reliant on both period and drama that seemed most potentially individual. Look 17’s ruffle-seamed track-skirt-suit in washed lemon nylon and the excellent quarter-zip, drop waisted, pleat skirted dresses in a deeply colored dense cotton mix in looks 2 and 29 were the highlights of this category. That track top, with shorts this time, was also shown in baby blue on a male model: it was one of several looks in which Lei and Jiang’s womenswear was given a pretty persuasive test drive on men.
