Jenny Fax | Paris Women’s Fashion Week AW25
Words by Jude Jones, Photographs by Lauren Cremer
The Girlish Melancholia of Jenny Fax
Jenny Fax founder Hsueh Jen Fang calls her brand one for “ordinary girls”. Except, “ordinary” has a slightly darkened hue in her lexical world, it works in twisted chiaroscuro with her deceptive, verging-on-uncanny palettes of pastels and pinks to create a visual-spiritual aesthetic of Harajuku melancholia. The brand’s 2000s Tumblr-infused saudade dialogues provocatively – if with a soft-spoken nihilism – with themes of girlhood and femininity in our digital, social-media age.
The tropes of the brand, a veteran of the Taiwanese and Tokyo fashion scenes but a newcomer to Paris, are drawn from a Louise-Bourgeois politics of memory and of Sylvia Plath-esque thwarted youth. Jen Fang has elsewhere confessed intimately about her childhood disaffection in techno-futurist Taiwan and years of longing in a Christian boarding school, her horror-flick escapism and struggles with self-acceptance. In fact, this latter theme bubbled to a fore last season – her Paris debut – when she 3D printed a silicon corset of her body for one of her models to wear at a coffee-shop presentation, elevating herself to the romantic status of muse while refusing to hide herself behind neither clothing nor brand, behind pleats, tucks, or folds.
Relics from SS25 made spectral returns in AW25, most notably an airbrushed backpack bearing symbols of Christian salvation and rebirth – a flower-swaddled cross bearing the brand’s name, a precocious lamb treading on the morning pasture – with the text “I once was lost… But now I’m found.” These religious elements are both playful, drawing on digitised Catholic revival and spiritual aesthetics, and disquieting, nourishing the sinister substratum that forges a connective sinew through this season’s looks.
The backpacks combine with other infantile and schoolgirl elements – a pink-bowed uniform sweater embroidered with the message “I’m sorry” in pink, a pastel lilac blouse in the shape of a baby’s onesie – to accentuate Jen Fang’s interplays of innocence and abjection, leaving wafting a tense Lolita air, both in the word’s otaku and Nabokovian valences, that is. It is then worth noting the footwear created in collaboration with Angelic Pretty, one of Japan’s veteran “lolita” brands, as well as the maximalist kawaii of Japanese manicurist @nailsbymei, who contributed nail art for the collection. Both of these represented particular highlights on the level of the brand’s styling. Styling which, for the seventh season running, was spearheaded by the Russian ingenue and enfant terrible Lotta Volkova, whose taste for the provocatively girlish finds a perfect host in Jenny Fax’s cerebrally feminine, Tim Burton-esque worldbuilding.
Violence is elsewhere suggested and gestured towards in the collection, often in dialectic play with Jen Fang’s outward exclamations of whimsy and girlhood: the hacksawed ripping of a sweater on which are painted ethereal cherubic faces, holes and openings encountered at unexpected anatomical junctures (a signature of the brand, this time harnessed on the breasts), and styling elements that evoke hand or neck braces, plastered in stickers and other get-well-soon ephemera. The liminal space setting of the presentation, in which the models gathered in silent semi-circle formation, staring alone at an easel which presented a photograph of a returning model from previous seasons - in a sterile white room, only furthered the effect of discomfort and nightmarish other-worlds. Jenny Fax AW25 was an uncomfortable, disturbing, and quietly confrontational package, all wrapped in pretty pink, soft silks, and Victorian white lace.
