Shimo Zhou and Une Yea of STAFFONLY are endlessly fascinated by, you guessed it, staff. The menswear label, founded in London in 2015 and now based in Shanghai, takes into account the countless places you can find staff: backstage at a fashion show, working in a hospital, the mailroom of an office. But instead of endlessly focusing on uniforms, the superficial common denominator of a staff, Chinese designers are more interested in the concept of common identity. Does what you do determine who you are?
This is where their signature sense of humor comes into play. For spring, the designers focused on the process, and especially the procrastination that comes with it, and contextualized their collection around schoolwork. Yea explained that the oversized, upside-down pencils and thumbtacks that decorated their show space were “a mood board that shows your workspace, maybe it’s virtual or maybe it’s just a notebook.”
The details that make up this collection are drawn from “the characteristics and customs of the labor process,” as Zhou described them. Is the process of working on something itself an act of procrastination? Not no. You don’t necessarily do exactly what you should do, but you do something. This is the – somewhat vague but thought-provoking – cornerstone of this series, and it came most convincingly to life in the designers’ interpretations of tailoring, adorned with screen prints of painter’s tape that define the seams, the corners of the lapels and the openings of piped pockets. . Also fun: cotton divider bags with grid-like prints, oversized backpacks (for all the work you’ve accumulated through procrastination), and cartoonish pencil shavings stuck on the soles of shoes.
Beneath the humorous surface was a heightened (pun intended) look at today’s creative process: “This collection is about the beauty of the process, but it is also a response to artificial intelligence,” said Zhou, “people type their prompts and get the images faster, but maybe it works too fast.” The gist of it is that if you don’t respect the process – and take the time to procrastinate – you’re not giving yourself time to think. “That’s why we want to value the process and show the public how the staff works, how we create.” But don’t let STAFF enable you. Procrastination is part of the process, but not always productive. For example, each model walked backwards after moving forward before leaving the runway.
