HKFG Fashion Farm Foundation | Paris Women’s Fashion Week AW25
Words by Jude Jones, Photographs courtesy of HKFG Fashion Farm
Meet the Hong Kong Brands Reshaping Global Fashion: HKFG at Paris Fashion Week AW25 Hong Kong occupies a liminal space in the global imaginary, its edges lapping softly like a reflection of moonlight or central city glow on the South China Sea. It is a sort of familiar stranger, an awesome hybrid of capitalist technomodernity and an inherited spiritual tradition, the final outcrop of British imperialism that has built its own cultural identity, fortress-like, in opposition both to its colonisation and its ensuing war for sovereignty with the Goliathan Chinese mainland.
Hong Kong has also been long defined by the efflorescence of creative energies and resonances formed in the crux of these ontological tensions: the transcendental screen-worlds of Wong Kar-wai, the ethereal cool and sound of his starlet Faye Wong, all illuminating under a soft neon phosphorescence new realms of inventive possibility and desire. Seeking to thrust this drive too into the sartorial world – where Eastern ingenuity has long been dominated by Japanese innovation, the sleek spirituality of Miyake Issei or the absurdist avant-garde of Rei Kawakubo – the Fashion Farm Foundation (FFF) this season transformed Paris Fashion Week’s second day into “a day specifically for Hong Kong fashion design” per its press release, presenting ten designers at the front of the city’s new design vanguard.
DEMO (@_demo_official)
Founded in 2014 by award-drenched designer Derek Chan, DEMO refutes stable cultural signifiers to fluidly elide both menswear and womenswear, churning nostalgia and unrelenting futurity. Presenting his AW25 collection on a dystopian dunescape populated only by his models and a stylised bus stop cheerfully that declared “stay bright”, an ambiance somewhere between My Neighbour Totoro and Waiting for Godot, the heart of the collection was in Chan’s playful manipulation of shapes and fits: body-swallowing blazer-trenchcoats and trousers, boxers that explode up above waistlines, tiny baby-crop tees. The styling notes were thus distinctly Y2K - accentuated by the abundance of charms, chunky trainers, and studs that accompanied - however simultaneously recalled Hong Kong’s own fashion demimondes of its 1980s and 90s with pinstripe or tweed elements and a saudade epoque yet-to-come of less gendered, less serious fashion expression.
Kinyan Lam (@kinyan_lam)
Against an impossibly orange sky, licked and lashed by the somnambulant perambulating of a wearily setting sun, a phantasmal army waxes and wanes out of formation, their apparitional forms armoured in linens and wools. The colours – pond-like greens and blues, earthy browns and dusty off-whites –, in sympoiesis with the fabrics and their textures, all gesture toward a more material existence some time else, a more material past to which they all wish to return. Founded in December 2022 by Lan Kinyan, whose personal history implicates work with natural dying and ethical production methods, Kinyan describes his AW25 collection – entitled “We All Die a Little Every Day” – as the progeny of an apocalyptic revelation he once experienced while holidaying with friends, exposing both the precious transience of human life and the formidable infinity of the universe that envelops us. Embroidered details – almost invisible thread marks and star-like embellishments – thus take on cosmological significances, while the clothes – jumpers, scarves, and jackets – hug and swaddle the wearer, as if softly protecting them from the chaos outside. The performances of Kinyan’s models at the presentation, who held their arms tight to their bodies, contorted in self-embrace, accentuated this mood, giving his show the quiet melodrama of a prophetic dream like Kinyan’s, in which “my body dissolved and melted away, without struggle or pain.”
Reverie by Caroline Hú (@carolineqiqi)
There is an innate sense of whimsy to Caroline Hú’s brand, the designer perhaps at the forefront of Hong Kong’s fashion renaissance. A former LVMH Young Designer Award semi-finalist and the first Chinese designer to work with Valentino, her sartorial worlds conjure visions of romance and daydreams (rêverie, in French), interrogating the malleable possibilities of shape and form to create clothing at the intersections of architecturality and ephemerality, like Ozymandias’s statue dissolving in a desert storm. Her dresses thus billow, metamorphosise, and implode, surrender to the wind then surrender the body to new rules and possibilities through her meticulous, near-devotional craftsmanship. “As the audience admires the beautiful garments,” Hù said about her AW25 offering, “they also experience a sense of freedom and a romantic attitude toward life.” Hù isn’t just content for her art to pliantly imitate life. No, she is determined to submit life to her own visionary art and beautified worldview too, to turn the runway into an anti-mimetic theatre of cruelty of the most transformational degree.
Ænrmòus (@aenrmous)
The year is 1805 and the world is not what it once was. Technological expansion and a swelling consumer economy have sewn new global desire lines for plantation goods like cotton, entrenching demonic networks of enslavement and exploitation on all sides of the Atlantic. Global industrialisation is meanwhile working in conjunction with these chimeric forces to erode the moral core of the human subject, to erode man’s relationship with the environment and bastardise it into one of pure extraction and subjugation, of domination and death. However, in mythical “Calamity Town”, the clouds of all this were beginning to clear; the sun was breaking and a new language of hope was emerging, slow and uncertain like a birth-wet foal from its mother’s womb. This is the legend underpinning Ænrmòus’s AW25 collection “Calamity Town I” (also named “Crystallum”), conceived as a project of liberation, survival, and rebirth. Employing a cabalistic, mystical approach to clothing design in which visual cues and symbols illuminate a higher, quasi-spiritual truth, the brand’s trademark is a sort of melancholic gothic maximalism, in which clothes are latticed with rips and signs of decay that speak stories of resilience and trial, sprout wings and alien-like forms as symbols of flight, new life, and ascension. For Ænrmous, fashion is literally a narrative form, and here these narratives take on truly Odyssean proportions.
Fashion Farm Foundation (FFF) is a non-profit organisation established in 2012 to promote fashion design in Hong Kong and worked in collaboration with HKFG, sponspored by CCIDA, to present ten Hong Kong designers at Paris Fashion Week. Alongside the four designers featured here, FFF also presented: IP-Axis Studio (@ipaxis_industrial.studio), Redemptive (@redemptive_official), Jesse Lee (@jesseleepocheung), PONDER.ER (@ponder.er), Rhyzem (@rhyzem), and SWEETLIMEJUICE (@sljlondon).
