Xander Zhou ventured off the runway again this season, opting for a digital release, but this didn’t prevent the Beijing-based designer from kicking off Shanghai Fashion Week on the first night of shows. Last season Zhou premiered a collection video at a screening-cum-party at System, the now defunct club space that was a favorite of the city’s Fashion Week contingent. This time around he leaned on the same community—plus some international friends—to tease his fall lineup on social media. Zhou shared preview images of the lookbook with his pals, asking them to share them in the two hours before he released the photos himself.
The idea behind this “interaction,” explained Zhou, was to allow people to offer their own interpretations of his collection before the launch, so it would “take on multiple versions of itself online.” What he was getting at, in his typical philosophical style, was interrogating our collective relationship with perception and how it’s been altered by technology. Perception, Zhou argues, is no longer limited by biological functions. It’s aided and altered by everything from artificial intelligence to information online and even something as straightforward as a filter applied to a photo on social media. Does reality still exist as we know it when it can be adjusted, reconstructed, and recalibrated to our whim?
True to form, Zhou’s seasonal dispatch included a robust dossier of research and his own meta theories. They always make for an intriguing, thought-provoking read. Yet equally or perhaps even more compelling than his ruminations on technology and the way it continues to impact our experience in the world are Zhou’s tailoring machinations. “From the very start I decided I wanted to create a collection composed entirely of suits,” he said, “I wanted to explore a system with a fixed structure and see how far I could push variation within that frame.”
Each of Zhou’s uniform extrapolations began with the same knit onesie over which he placed rave-ready studded platform boots, military-inspired bands, and, eventually, funky shirting interpretations and an array of truly fantastic jackets. The fashion pendulum has swung in favor of dressiness once more, and Zhou’s riffs on the men’s jacket were some of the most interesting and novel of the season. Standouts included the way he turned a lapel into a vampiric collar on a navy single breasted jacket or how the closure of another consisted of a pointy panel on one side piercing through a slash on another. He also moved the folding point of a lapel up to the chest and fixed it with a button, and applied a hoodie-like pocket to another silhouette. At 93 looks, there’s certainly lots to parse through. Zhou knows how to build momentum and retain attention, but he still could have done with a tighter edit.
“I wasn’t trying to deconstruct the garments,” he insisted, “I kept asking myself, how can I strip away reassigned functions of these elements and give them a new, even yet-to-be-invented purpose or form?” This he accomplished. Zhou is the rare designer whose tangible output walks his more conceptual talk. He was in remarkable form this season. Hopefully next time he’ll manage to get back on the runway—Shanghai Fashion Week benefits from his presence.
