Was it a carnival or a movie screening; a techno rave or a chill membership night time? It’s all the time exhausting to inform with Xander Zhou, a fixture of China’s trend trade and a must-see at Shanghai Trend Week. A yr in the past he common his runway present into an intergalactic symposium. Final season, it was a couture-esque salon present at a venue stylized as a museum gallery. This time round, he created a time-warping carnival that zigzagged from Zhou’s singular model of neo-futurism to courtly Medieval Europe and again once more for an after-party—Zhou loves a very good night time out—which he hosted at Shanghai’s fashionable System membership with a lineup of his favourite DJs.
Regardless of his eye for grandiosity, Zhou has a contact for making essentially the most elaborate really feel private. His concept this season was to have a look at theaters and ballets of yore to craft a group based mostly on their archetypes: harlequins, courtesans, jousters, dancers, et al. He singled out the ballet de cour and the commedia dell’arte as two considerably opposing traditions he borrowed from to move them to his personal imagined future: “They had been integral parts of European pre-Lent carnivals,” he stated, explaining that ballets had been “shows of the monarchy’s energy,” staged in royal venues with nobles as heroes or deities, whereas the comedies had been carried out by skilled actors with bandits and satire on the forefront.
Zhou is a well-researched designer whose ideas rival educational theses. He’s constructed his runway collections with the longer term as his major preoccupation, letting his industrial output learn by his usually outlandish ideations. He provided court docket jester uniforms within the form of colorblocked bodysuits, which one might see fly off the cabinets as sweaters or straightforward second-skin knits. Notably promising had been his tailoring extrapolations: He transfigured basic tuxedo jackets right into a bomber, and mixed medieval breeches with slim-fitting slacks. Most creative was the way in which by which he flattened and decreased the silhouette of a go well with to a caricature composed of easy geometric shapes.
Again to the unique query: It was all the pieces unexpectedly: a movie screening of a futuristic carnival adopted by a techno rave with parts of a chill membership night time, together with masseuses stationed on the venue’s high ground. What makes Zhou such a compelling designer to observe is that no matter he’s doing, he all the time goes all the way in which.
