The cover of Labelhood’s Fall 2024 zine features a model wearing a super-sized gray jacket, an interpretation of the traditional tangzhuang, covered in an intricate Chinese floral motif rendered in silver embroidery. The same piece is featured in Labelhood’s title exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum, and closed AO Yes’ Fall 2024 runway show last Thursday.
Each SHFW, Labelhood, the independent designer incubator, hosts an arts and culture festival in conjunction with its own show sub-calendar, which falls within the larger Fashion Week umbrella. The Labelhooood showcase includes everything from retail stalls to food and drink stalls, along with a number of thematic exhibitions, hosted in the museum next to their designer showroom. The overarching theme of this season’s festival was a ‘return to authenticity’.
In the wake of the pandemic, China’s brightest fashion talents have re-embraced their roots, giving them a ‘contemporary’ (in Western terms) twist, and the local market has been quick to embrace it again. A trend that started with subtle references to Chinese ready-to-wear tradition has since grown into a full-fledged style and has become a promising profitable business proposition in the region and beyond. Austin Wang and Yangson Liu’s AO Yes is one of the emerging labels currently at the forefront of this wave.
Founded in 2022 by Wang, a former fashion editor at Fashion China, and Liu, a graduate of Tokyo’s Bunka Fashion College, AO Yes examines Eastern culture and its traditional aesthetics to reassess them through a sophisticated and modern lens. Before the fall, Wang and Liu reflected on the idea of wisdom, looking more specifically at the word Sensei. The East Asian honorific means ‘teacher’ and is used to refer to people in authority or who have reached a certain level of achievement. “This collection is about the modern intellectual,” the designers said during a showroom visit, explaining that they wanted to portray the sophisticated and educated people of today. “They are who we call Sensei,” they said.
Wang and Liu cut a sharp double-breasted jacket to pair with wide trousers made from wool suits and herringbone, lined with lush Chinese jacquards and cuffs to emphasize the textile combination of East-meets-West elegance. They draped fringed half-scarves into the bodices of sweaters and dresses, and used Wang’s signature calligraphic illustrations as visual representations of their contemporary Senseis. Their signature silhouette, a hybrid of a tangzhuang and a pleated skirt, was here designed as a jacket and worn open over shorts and a white shirt for both men and women. It was both sexy and cerebral, as were the duo’s tailored sheaths with high collars and kimono shoulders, conveying the equivalent allure of a form-fitting bodycon dress for today’s sapiosexual.
