Xander Zhou framed this fall 2024 assortment as “high-tech couture,” and titled it “Sciremony,” a hybrid of “science” and “ceremony.” “I name it couture as a result of I would like folks to know I take this assortment significantly,” stated the Beijing-based designer after his present, “however I additionally wish to present a special strategy for menswear, utilizing scientific analysis as the strategy.”
Zhou has positioned his runway collections as laboratory experiments that push his ready-to-wear line ahead whereas satisfying his artistic urges. Final season, he staged an intergalactic expo targeted on super-intelligent humanoids. This time round he hosted a masquerade ball and usual his venue within the model of a pure historical past museum. Zhou’s style for sci-fi was nonetheless current, however now dissolved into an examination of the long run within the context of the previous: “ritualistic futurism” is how he put it.
A trend present in itself is nothing however a ritual, besides that somewhat than celebrating life or spirituality, its rites and processions exalt the thought of change. Novelty is the mantra right here, and nothing fascinates Zhou greater than evolution and the ever-changing, mystifying prospect that’s the future, which right here took an anachronistic form. This season, somewhat than proposing bionic arms and second-skin outerwear, Zhou focused on that almost all timeless and traditional bastions of menswear: the go well with. Zhou’s males weren’t cyborgs however gents and dandies who used strolling sticks, wore sweeping capes, and gently swaddled cat collectible figurines and bonsais with their arms. For a designer so enamored by science and expertise, this assortment appeared extra involved with the human; a little bit melancholic at instances, and others moody and alluringly villainous.
There have been slim fits ornamented with techy plates, which the designer utilized generally as armor and others as flattened corsets or panniers. Zhou has made this mechanical design language a signature, and it might be fascinating to see him push it even additional. What would these mechanisms appear to be embellished or woven into his lush materials somewhat than appliquéd? Zhou has worlds to discover as he ventures into the idea of “high-tech couture.” Some fashions donned half-bionic furry stoles and others wore robo-looking, boot-chap hybrids, each symbols of Zhou’s past-forward future. Zhou is aware of find out how to create a conversation-starter showpiece, but his most impactful work this season was discovered within the nuances of his tailoring reimaginations. He prolonged the collars in his shirts, generally to fence-in the faces of his fashions and others as protruding sculptural equipment, and deftly sculpted those in his jackets with exact dramatic flare.
There was an air of gothic romance to the entire continuing, heightened by Zhou’s toying with the thought of house and time. “The long run is an enigma and my designs are conjectures, dramatized projections of hypothetical situations,” he wrote in his assortment notes. However the future is nothing aside from hypothetical till it turns into the current. What shapes our future, in spite of everything, is the curiosity of these like Zhou who additionally take a hand in fashioning it.
