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 individuals to know I take this assortment severely,” stated the Beijing-based designer after his present, “however I additionally need to present a unique method for menswear, utilizing scientific analysis as the tactic.”
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 normal his venue within the type 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 vogue present in itself is nothing however a ritual, besides that moderately than celebrating life or spirituality, its rites and processions exalt the concept 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, moderately than proposing bionic arms and second-skin outerwear, Zhou targeting that almost all timeless and basic 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 typically as armor and others as flattened corsets or panniers. Zhou has made this mechanical design language a signature, and it could be fascinating to see him push it even additional. What would these mechanisms appear like embellished or woven into his lush materials moderately 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 the way 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, typically 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 concept of area 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 apart 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.
