“My clothes have been here, but I haven’t yet,” laughs Bianca Saunders, the London-based menswear designer who, when I catch up with her in the middle of a whirlwind trade show, has only recently arrived in Hong Kong for the very first time. “I’ve never been to Asia before – there’s so much more I could explore with my work being on this side of the world.”
Exploring what’s possible with the clothes we wear is a core tenet of Saunders’ androgynous aesthetic, and sometimes subtle but always impactful body of work, which saw her shortlisted for the LVMH Prize and selected as an Andam prizewinner in 2021. She was the first Black woman ever to win the latter, an accomplishment that feels groundbreaking but which she doesn’t seem at all inclined to flaunt. Similarly to her designs, which can be highly conceptual but never overbearingly so, she speaks with balance and nuance, reflecting the effortlessly cool, lived-in quality of her clothes.
Maybe she’s just here to have some fun, after all. “There always needs to be a pick-me-up,” Saunders says of sending a selection of her designs down the runway in Hong Kong to the tune “Feel Up” by Grace Jones – the legendary fashion icon, singer-songwriter and a fellow Jamaican.
“That’s my era of music, when it rhymes with my brand. I wanted people to notice – ‘Oh, this is the world that I bring’. Whenever I show in a new country, I try to show who I am, and you get the full 360 of what my brand is supposed to say, like the sort of clothes or the vibrancy of my British Caribbean background.”
The designer is relaxed when talking about putting the fun back in fashion – especially menswear – with her signature lighthearted, yet still sharply tailored, looks. It’s as if she rarely thinks too hard about getting her message across, and prefers to let the clothes do the talking instead.
Saunders’ repertoire of structured men’s trousers are given a playful twist here and there, while various prints are used to maximise visual effect and explore the idea of movement – a nod to how her brand challenges conformity in both a literal and figurative sense, undoing the restrictive codes of traditional menswear.
“Whenever I’m looking at clothes, I’m always trying to capture them when they move,” says Saunders. Fluidity of fabric features prominently in her collections. Her most recent presentation for autumn/winter 2025, held in Paris’ Palais de Tokyo, showcased models dragging weights across the room, fully clothed in looks from the collection, itself inspired by archival footage of male Jamaican dancers.
“It’s usually the slowness of an arm moving like, ‘Oh, I want to drop the shoulder in that way’,” she says. “Or a crease in a jacket – ‘I really want to zip that in.’ Watching how clothes naturally move on people, and the in-between, is what interests me in design.”
