PFW AW25: Ziggy Chen - A Fashion Manifesto for Modern Living

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

Ziggy Chen’s penchant for portmanteaus is one of the Chinese designer’s more endearing quirks. For his SS21 lookbook, he coined the term “COLLAGEMORY” – a rag-tag, tongue-twisting rejoinder of “collage” and “memory” – to name his Dadaist strategy, choosing piecemealed human-animal hybrids as models over, you know, real people. Last season, he presented “GNARTICATE”, the unpronounceable offspring of “gnarled branches” and “intricate”, inspired by the Chinese concept of 盘枝错节 (“intertwining roots”) that evocatively metaphorises the invisible, complex, and beautiful substructures of a plant needed for its flourishing, its ethereal dance toward sun and sky.

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

All this inflects his work with a tinge of both poetics and play, and this season Chen continued his game by adding “VOLEISURE”, as in “volition” (“the power of choosing or determining”, per Merriam-Webster) meets “leisure”, to his visual-literary vocabulary.  In practice, this meant retaining much of the sartorial lexicon for which the designer has become known: earthy and organic palettes, a masteral play of fabrics and textures, and willowy, fluid silhouettes that gracefully enhance the movement of the body.

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

However, by turning both volition and leisure into the nuclei of his latest collection, Chen turned a microscope to materiality and the intentional ways that textures and fabrics interact with the human body, introducing a new semantics of wearability and embodiment. Models were swaddled and cocooned by oversized blazers, mittens, hoods and scarves, yet were never overpowered by them, creating a sense of inner serenity and warmth, of protective solitude and ataraxia. Chen accentuated this with his selection of fabrics: wool, cashmere, cotton, hemp, and linen suggested a haptic softness and lightness while also prioritising organic, earthborn materials, in dextrous symbiosis with all his earthen, vegetal hues.

Despite the oversized and exaggerated styling details though, Chen characteristically evaded the gravitational fetish toward the ultrastructural. Fabrics flowed and billowed in naturalistic ways, becoming ethereal extensions of the wearer’s body, or hugged comfortably and sensibly, moulded by clever pleats and buttons. These details juxtaposed the garments to the show space, a cavernous and brutalistic multi-storey that insisted on urban solidity – a void-like greyness, heavy concrete and steel forms – in oxymoronic yet thoughtful tension with the organic, humanistic, and ephemeral dogmas of Chen’s garments.

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)

Of course, this was all in the show’s design. “In a contemporary world that pushes on the accelerator,” read the show notes, fittingly printed on a textural, recycled-material brown paper, “ZIGGY CHEN offers a suspended, contemplative, and poetic momentum.” By design, the Ziggy Chen AW25 show was a deft interplay of the urban and the arcadian, inspired by “the precise point where an architecture of a roof meets the winter sky.” The thematic references were thus fitting: traditional Chinese watercolour painting, the rural woodworking and cottage-craft through which human marks are made onto the natural and – perhaps through a penetrating splinter or a moment’s contact – Nature’s marks are made on the human.

This is the ethos of “VOLEISURE”, finding the peaceful middle-ground between the urban and the natural, the modern and the ancient. “VOLEISURE is not just a collection but a suggestion of a return to a spontaneous way of living,” the notes concluded. “The pieces allow the wearer to move agilely […] a whispered, timeless, and refined way of life.” Against the almost violent hustle and bustle of a Paris in the throes of Fashion Week, this was a strangely grounding, if not a bit boilerplate, reminder by an always in-tune Ziggy Chen to touch grass and breath.

Image: Raphaele Sohier (@raphsohier)