Xander Zhou described this Fall 2024 collection as “high-tech couture” and called it “Sciremony,” a hybrid of “science” and “ceremony.” “I call it couture because I want people to know that I take this collection seriously,” the Beijing-based designer said after his show, “but I also want to show a different approach to menswear, using scientific research as a method. ”
Zhou has positioned his runway collections as laboratory experiments that advance his ready-to-wear line while satisfying his creative urges. Last season he organized an intergalactic expo focused on super-intelligent humanoids. This time he organized a masquerade ball and decorated his location in the style of a natural history museum. Zhou’s predilection for sci-fi was still present, but now resolved in an investigation of the future in the context of the past: ‘ritual futurism’, as he put it.
A fashion show in itself is nothing more than a ritual, except that instead of celebrating life or spirituality, the rituals and processions glorify the idea of change. Novelty is the mantra here, and nothing fascinates Zhou more than evolution and the ever-changing, enigmatic prospect of the future, which here took an anachronistic form. This season, instead of proposing bionic arms and second-skin outerwear, Zhou focused on menswear’s most timeless and classic bastion: the suit. Zhou’s men were not cyborgs, but gentlemen and dandies who used walking sticks, wore capes and gently wrapped cat figurines and bonsais with their arms. For a designer so enamored with science and technology, this collection seemed more concerned with people; sometimes a bit melancholy, and sometimes moody and seductively mean.
There were slim suits decorated with technical plates, which the designer sometimes used as armor and others as flattened corsets or panniers. Zhou has made this mechanical design language a signature, and it would be interesting to see how he takes it even further. What would these mechanisms look like if they were embellished or woven into his lush fabrics instead of appliquéd? Zhou has worlds to explore as he ventures into the concept of ‘high-tech couture’. Some models wore semi-bionic furry stoles and others wore robo-like, boot-chap hybrids, both symbols of Zhou’s past-future. Zhou knows how to create a centerpiece that will start a conversation, but his most impactful work this season came in the nuances of his reinterpretations of tailoring. He lengthened the collars of his shirts, sometimes to shield the faces of his models and others as excellent sculptural accessories, and deftly sculpted the collars in his jackets with precise dramatic flair.
There was an air of Gothic romanticism to the entire proceedings, enhanced by Zhou’s playing with the idea of space and time. “The future is a mystery and my designs are conjectures, dramatized projections of hypothetical scenarios,” he wrote in his collected notes. But the future is nothing but hypothetical until it becomes the present. After all, what shapes our future is the curiosity of people like Zhou, who also have a hand in shaping it.
