Feng Chen Wang London Fashion Week SS 2021

The ‘Rework’ collection from Feng Chen Wang is a sustainability conscious line focused on reducing environmental impact. The collection takes reference from Feng’s own memories; growing up as a child in rural China through her past collections she reflects on the meaning and messages each memory conveys.

The Rework collection recycles past Feng Chen Wang garments and fabrics, creating new pieces with the brand’s signature 2-in-1 design technique which incorporates deconstruction and draping. It combines the concept of recycle and redesign by reviewing the production process to reduce the brands impact towards the environment, allowing the garments and fabric that are leftover to be brought into a new dimension. This capsule revisits important Feng Chen Wang moments, such as the AW18 collection where “There’s no place like home” was a key theme. Feng referenced her first house number by embroidering 239 to evoke a sense of home, her memories, family and friends.

The iconic SS18 collection’s ‘Made in China’ stamp is also included in this capsule to continue seeking to redefine and challenge its global connotations. These key moments are reflected upon and reincarnated into the Rework collection to signify a revival and remind ourselves to reflect on our own memories.

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CFDA Announces Initiatives to Fight Systemic Racism in Fashion Industry

The CFDA has outlined several initiatives targeted on making systemic change in light of the “deplorable acts of racism and violence that we have seen play out in our country over this past week,” as announced in a joint statement today by chairman Tom Ford and president and CEO Steven Kolb. It follows behind a string of similar announcements as brands, companies and people worldwide respond to the deaths of George Floyd — the African-American man who was killed while in police custody in Minneapolis last week — and others that have been killed by the police.

“Black people in this country are reeling from years of injustice stemming from institutional constructs such as slavery, segregation, mass incarceration, police brutality and economic and voter suppression,” the CFDA said. “The Black community is experiencing anger and frustration on top of the effects of the global pandemic that has hit communities of color the hardest.”

According to the statement, the CFDA held a board meeting on Tuesday to formulate various actions that the organization plans to take in order to “stand in solidarity with those who are discriminated against.” Among the initiatives, the organization plans to create an in-house employment program to aid Black talent, a mentorship program focused on Black students, and to begin immediately donating to organizations that benefit the Black community.

“Having a clear voice and speaking out against racial injustice, bigotry and hatred is the first step, but this is not enough,” the CFDA stated. “This is a deeply disturbing moment that speaks to us all…We must do something.”

Source: Hypebeast

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COMME des GARÇONS Drops Exclusive "EMERGENCY Special" Collection

COMME des GARÇONS has released a limited-edition collection titled “EMERGENCY Special,” which is set to release inline with the re-opening of retail stores in France and alongside a reservation program in Japanese outposts.

Each COMME des GARÇONS store in Japan will allow customers to shop via appointment only and in limited numbers. However, to celebrate the re-openings, the Rei Kawakubo-helmed label has worked on a collection that centers around positive phrases, reminding us of the good causes behind staying at home and taking mass social action to combat the coronavirus crisis.

As a result, T-shirts, windbreaker jackets and tote bags have been emblazoned with the phrases “believe in a better tomorrow,” “thinking and doing will result in the future,” and “on to the future, with good energy.” The text is presented in a hand-applied look, looking as if it could be found on a homemade sign.

The collection ranges from approximately $47 USD to $130 USD, and can be ordered exclusively through COMME des GARÇONS stores.

Source: HypeBeast

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NAERSILING Xu Zhidong: The Meaning of Fashion

AW20 China International Fashion Week with the theme of "Reconstruction • Retrograde 2020" was held from May 1-7, 2020.  On May 4, the high-end women's clothing brand under the Fashion Group-NAERSILING (Na Ersi Ling) live broadcasted for the first tim.

Different from the design of a single show, this cloud live broadcast was an innovative application of three different styles of shows. As the design director Mr. Xu Zhidong said, "Return to the essence of the fashion show and re-examine the meaning of fashion to life."

The NAERSILING brand is no stranger to fashion circles. From 2015 to 2016, it became famous for participating in Shenzhen Fashion Week for two consecutive years. In 2018, NAERSILING landed in New York Fashion Week, NYFW. The public library released a "Future Enlightenment" theme show, detonating the fashion circle.

The head of NAERSILING has been rarely seen. He is the chief designer of this big show-Mr. Xu Zhidong.

Xu Zhidong, graduated from the School of Art and Design, Tianjin Polytechnic University and majored in fashion design. Since graduating in 2007 and entering the winners' clothing, 13 years have passed. He has been an intern, design assistant, master designer, design manager, chief designer, and brand director. Today, he is also the chief designer and brand director of the NAERSILING brand . This means that he is not only a perceptual creator, but also a rational manager.

Xu Zhidong advocates simple and modern design, prefers black and white and solid colors, "simple things are more powerful", and is good at material collision and deconstruction design. "Inadvertently revealing modern and advanced", every piece of clothing is made with excellence, attitude and modern personality. "Women who don’t want to stand out from the crowd are not suitable for wearing clothes I designed," as the theme of this season's "City Capture" shows electro-optic blue wool suit, silver gloss PVC trench coat, extra long wide-shoulder white wool coat ... Every piece tells the story of women, and every piece of clothing is showing a fashion attitude that cannot be copied. As long as you dare to control, you instantly increase your sense of presence.

Of course, as a brand director, shouldering performance indicators and operational responsibilities, he can't just blindly play creative ideas, regardless of the market. Because of this, he has always adhered to the concept of fashion and practical wear. Since its establishment in 2009, NAERSILING has been favored by many urban women. More importantly, he attaches great importance to the value and power given to people by fashion. "The charm of fashion is to make you a better and stronger self."

After the live broadcast, the poster fashion network interviewed Xu Zhidong. The dialogue is as follows:

Q1: Please introduce the NAERSILING brand and its audience?

Xu Zhidong: NAERSILING is an independent brand of Winner Fashion Group. It was founded in 2009 in Shenzhen, China, and advocates a “free and new luxury” life proposition-true luxury, no It's just the noble luxury of the material, but also the freedom and nobility of the soul. Brand style: free, simple, modern.

Our audience is contemporary women with dual economic and spiritual freedoms. They are loyal to themselves, grow independently, never set limits for themselves, and are brave to explore more possibilities of life.

Q2: Please explain the theme of "City Shadow Catcher" in this NAERSILING release show from your perspective?

Xu Zhidong: The city is the home of contemporary women. Every woman travels in the city, insisting on self while integrating into change; switching between ideal and reality, walking between toughness and softness, and finally coexisting with the city, coexisting and sharing .

Q3: How did you present the concept of "urban shadow catcher" in your design?

Xu Zhidong: This show follows NAERSILING ’s consistent design style of “freedom, simplicity, and modernity”, and at the same time incorporates the elements of “city imprint”, using classic black and modern white as the main colors, decorated with star silver and electric blue Collision of materials, creative silhouette, modern tailoring, interpretation of the city's tough lines and the inner softness of urban women.

Q4: Has Yunxiu live broadcast changed the brand requirements?

Xu Zhidong: From the initial fashion magazine, to Weibo, to short video and live broadcast, the change of media has not changed the nature of the fashion show. The core of everyone's focus is still on design, products and trends, so we are doing good products While designing, we also need to pay attention to the integration of technology and fashion, and the application of digitization. 

Q5: In this special period, what is the special meaning of doing Yunxiu live broadcast?

Xu Zhidong: Every industry has its own mission. Doctors save people and soldiers protect the country. Our duty in the fashion industry is to create beauty, show beauty, and stimulate productivity with beauty.

FASHIONADO

Gucci Fall 2020 Ready-To-Wear

Gucci was back in its week-opening spot today after a season as the Milan closer, and Alessandro Michele got things started with a major bang, staging a show that was as spectacular as it was intimate. A week ago in New York, the fashion show was declared over (a little prematurely, given Marc Jacobs’s own enlivening experience there). Michele is among our most sensitive designers. He feels the immense strain of producing these in-person events multiple times a year—he called them rituals in his postshow presser, and he absolutely intended the religious connotations—but he also understands how the internet age potentially threatens their future. Is it live, or is it Instagram?

Michele is insistent on the live experience, though he’s plenty savvy about social media too. He sent his show invitation via WhatsApp, an attention-grabbing, modern move that also happened to be a green alternative to the mountains of waste created by show production. A pair of WhatsApp’d images followed the invite; one was a snapshot of Michele doing his best #evachenpose, fingers covered in rings and nails painted an aqua blue, and the other was a close-up of a Gucci label stitched with the words Faconnier de Rêves. That’s “Dream Maker” to you and me.

In ringmaster—high priest?—mode, Michele staged a show in the round, exposing the behind-the-scenes action of the hair and makeup teams and the model dressers at work as they prepared the 60 cast members in their looks. There were shades of Unzipped (the 1995 fashion documentary) here, only in this instance the stage revolved, giving the audience full 360-degree views, and—the designer pointed out afterward—doing the same for the models and the backstage crew. “You were our show, and we were your show,” he said in his typically elliptical manner. Entry into the show space was through a backstage area too, and Michele was seen mingling in the crowd.

Inserting viewers in the action would seem a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon, but Michele found himself connecting it with childhood. Last season he paid tribute to Gucci’s Tom Ford days; there were slip dresses, exposed bras, and ’70s-by-way-of-the-’90s pantsuits—the clothes that made Michele fall in love with fashion. Here, he looked further back, taking cues from “the perfection” of little girls’ clothes—pinafore dresses, school uniforms—and, it seemed, from the outfits of those little girls’ minders, nuns to nurses included.

He did something similar at his men’s outing last month; youth, for him, equates to “beauty and freedom.” For whom does it not? But today, as then, he kept the story lively. There were hippie nods, grunge allusions, and Moulin Rouge!–on-the-prairie gowns. And no, he didn’t bypass kink entirely. A patent leather harness was the accessory du jour.

As ever, the rule-breaking irreverence of his clothes was mirrored by the nontraditional beauties who wore them, but there seemed an inordinate number of overly thin models onstage this afternoon. Truer shape diversity would’ve made the communion of this Michele-orchestrated moment more powerful.

A voiceover at the start and end of the show in which the Italian director Federico Fellini celebrates the art of moviemaking illuminated Michele’s intentions today. “Fellini was talking about the sacredness of cinema and the rituals of filmgoing,” the designer explained. “We all belong to the same circus,” he continued, “and I really want to go on repeating this ritual.” Michele is a believer, and in turn, he makes believers of us too.

Source: Vogue

Fashionado

Louis Vuitton Fall 2020 Ready-To-Wear

“I wanted to imagine what could happen if the past could look at us.”

Nicolas Ghesquière is the cohost of this May’s Met gala (since then cancelled) and Louis Vuitton is sponsoring the Costume Institute exhibition, “About Time: Fashion and Duration,” that the gala celebrates. Ghesquière took as his subject this season the exhibition’s theme: that fashion is a mirror of the present moment—but not any old mirror. At Ghesquière’s Louis Vuitton, it’s a funhouse mirror in which eras, attitudes, and flashbacks intersect. And voilà: we flash forward.

This season Ghesquière enlisted the costume designer Milena Canonero, a frequent collaborator of Stanley Kubrick’s, to create a monumental backdrop of 200 choral singers, each one clothed in historical garb dating from the 15th century to 1950. It was a mammoth undertaking, and quite beautiful. “I wanted a group of characters that represent different countries, different cultures, different times,” Ghesquière explained beforehand. “I love this interaction between the people seated in the audience, the girls walking, and the past looking at them—these three visions mixed together.” The time-collapsing sensation was heightened by the fact that the song the chorus performed was a composition by Woodkid and Bryce Dessner based on the work of Nicolas de Grigny, a contemporary of Bach’s who never found fame.

Arguably, all of fashion is a synthesis of the past, but Ghesquière makes a closer study of it than most. He’s compelled by the anachronous. For spring 2018, he clashed 18th-century frock coats and the high-tech trainers of our contemporary period. Here, there was more in play: jewel-encrusted boleros met parachute pants, buoyant petticoats were paired with fitted tops whose designs looked cribbed from robotics, and bourgeois tailoring was layered over sports jerseys. Ghesquière seemed particularly taken with the visual codes of distance and speed—be it race-car driving, motocross, or space travel.

The biggest jolts came from the collection’s sporty parkas, because they tapped into the language of the street. Seventy years from now, or 600, in a tableau vivant of fashion, the early 21st century will be represented by these signifiers of our collective preference for the comforts and ease of performance wear. Ghesquière has long been applauded for his sci-fi projections into the unknown, but he’s just as resonant when he’s locked into the here and now.

We asked him what his hopes are for the future. “What I want is everyone to be safe,” he said. “This world can become a little more serene, that’s what I wish.”

Source: Vogue

FASHIONADO

Balenciaga Fall 2020 Ready-To-Wear

Fashion conversations frequently eddy around how much people enjoy ‘immersive’ experiences, but when the audience groped its way into the darkened Balenciaga stadium and suddenly realized that the first two rows were inundated with water—well, that gave ‘immersion’ a hellishly ominous new twist. It was just the beginning of Demna Gvasalia’s procession of sinister characters, walking on a vast stretch of water beneath an apocalyptic sky rent with fire, lightning and churning seas. “It’s the blackest show I ever did,” he said.

Black: its resurgence, the cutting of new silhouettes, its links to minimalism and classicism, is playing throughout fashion this season. To each their own, though. Gvasalia’s route is always freighted with social observation on the state of the world, power politics, dress codes, fetishism. His intense parade of priests and priestesses in long black robes, with their “religious purity, minimalism, austerity” arose from memories of the Orthodox church in Georgia, and looking at the Spanish Catholic origins of Cristóbal Balenciaga. “He made his first dresses from black velvet, for a Marquesa to wear to church,” said Gvasalia.

“I had a lot of clerical wear in my research. I come from a country where the Orthodox religion has been so predominant,” he said. “I went to church to confess every Saturday. Back then, I remember looking at all these young priests and monks, wearing these long robes and thinking, ‘How beautiful.’ You see them around Europe with their beards, hair knotted back and backpacks. I don’t know, I find it quite hot—but that’s my fetish.”

More than anything, though, Gvasalia said he wanted to shift the parameters of menswear, so he could finally get to don some Balenciaga priestly maxi-skirts himself: “How come it is acceptable for clerics to wear that, but if I put on a long jacket and a skirt I will be looked at? I can’t, even in 2020!” But there were no two ways about it—on the runway, these men looked menacing.

On closer inspection, they were wearing demonic red or black contact lenses; their faces brutally augmented with protheses. “Religious dress codes are all about hiding the body, about being ashamed—body and sex is the taboo. Whereas when you look into it, some of these people are the nastiest perverts,” said Gvasalia.

Holding that thought—about constraint, rules and belonging to sects—set him off, designing neoprene suits with tiny compressed waists for women and black leather “Pantaboots” with padlocked “chastity belts” and a whole series of leather biker suits.

It’s telling that Gvasalia has been spending so much time researching Cristóbal Balenciga’s archive—no doubt in preparation for his first Haute Couture collection in July. Maybe some of what he called “our gala girls” in draped dresses with gloved sleeves and built-in leggings are a foretaste?

As for hope, despite the biblical apocalyptic scenario Gvasalia created for fall: “In spite of all that’s going on in fashion and the world, I still love this. I suppose until the day I die, this is what I am passionate about. I love making clothes.”

Source: Vogue

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