Xander Zhou Shanghai Fall 2024 Assortment

Xander Zhou framed this autumn 2024 assortment as “high-tech couture,” and titled it “Sciremony,” a hybrid of “science” and “ceremony.” “I call it couture because I want people to know I take this collection seriously,” stated the Beijing-based fashion designer then his display, “but I also want to show a different approach for menswear, using scientific research as the method.”

Zhou has located his runway collections as laboratory experiments that push his ready-to-wear order ahead pace pleasing his ingenious urges. Ultimate season, he staged an intergalactic expo eager about super-intelligent humanoids. This future round he hosted a masquerade ball and formed his venue within the taste of a herbal historical past museum. Zhou’s style for sci-fi was once nonetheless provide, however now dissolved into an exam of the time within the context of the beyond: “ritualistic futurism” is how he put it.

A way display in itself is not anything however a ritual, except for that instead than celebrating occasion or spirituality, its rites and processions exalt the speculation of exchange. Novelty is the chant right here, and not anything fascinates Zhou greater than evolution and the ever-changing, mystifying chance that’s the time, which right here took an anachronistic circumstance. This season, instead than proposing bionic hands and second-skin outerwear, Zhou focused on that almost all undying and vintage bastions of menswear: the go well with. Zhou’s males weren’t cyborgs however gentlemen and dandies who worn strolling sticks, wore sweeping capes, and gently swaddled cat collectible figurines and bonsais with their hands. For a fashion designer so enamored via science and generation, this assortment gave the impression extra fascinated about the human; a modest melancholic from time to time, and others moody and alluringly villainous.

There have been thin fits ornamented with techy plates, which the fashion designer applied infrequently as armor and others as flattened corsets or panniers. Zhou has made this mechanical design language a signature, and it will be fascinating to peer him push it even additional. What would those mechanisms seem like decorated or woven into his lush materials instead than appliquéd? Zhou has worlds to discover as he ventures into the concept that of “high-tech couture.” Some fashions donned half-bionic bushy stoles and others wore robo-looking, boot-chap hybrids, each symbols of Zhou’s past-forward time. Zhou is aware of the way to assemble a conversation-starter showpiece, but his maximum impactful paintings this season was once discovered within the nuances of his tailoring reimaginations. He prolonged the collars in his shirts, infrequently to fence-in the faces of his fashions and others as sticking out sculptural equipment, and deftly sculpted those in his jackets with actual dramatic flare.

There was once an wind of gothic romance to the entire continuing, heightened via Zhou’s toying with the speculation of field and future. “The future is an enigma and my designs are conjectures, dramatized projections of hypothetical scenarios,” he wrote in his assortment notes. However the time is not anything alternative than hypothetical till it turns into the existing. What shapes our time, then all, is the interest of the ones like Zhou who additionally remove a hand in fashioning it.