Samuel Yang and Erik Litzén staged their spring show atop an old warehouse on the Suzhou Creek, a waterway that crosses Shanghai westward from the Huangpu River. East Wind is the name Yang and Litzén gave to the line-up. The designer and his life and creative partner explained: “The term has a different meaning in the West. Here, east wind is a powerful symbol of the power of transformation.”
The show location was an Art Deco style building that was formerly a warehouse for the National Industrial Bank of China. Located on what was once an industrial waterfront, it is now part of the vibrant and trendy Jing’an district, named after an ancient Chinese Buddhist temple. It’s an appropriate blend of geography and chronology; this time-consuming merging of East and West is something Yang believes in and something he illustrates very eloquently with his clothing.
About that: Soft, lightweight denim pieces, creased poplin shirts and silk-linen trousers were layered or worn under tailoring and bomber jackets, all echoing traditional Chinese styles. A burgundy maxi dress was reminiscent of the cheongsam, except it was knitted from loose yarn that revealed the shape of a soaring swallow when stretched against the body. A series of breezy crepe sets, simple panties underneath sheer iterations of themselves, and a pale jade green tank dress whose godets caressed the ground with every step also took off.
Yang and Litzén created some enchanting crumpled silk sheaths that they hand-dyed and edged with tiny beads. The DIY craftsmanship was reflected in the sometimes uneven paint, which gave a patina to the collection. Ditto a woven tunic made of ramie, dyed black but beautifully discolored by the rough tint at the hems.
“This is how we dress, this is actually how all people dress,” Litzén said of their integration of more artisanal and sometimes age-old elements, “combining something older with something new.” Yang and Litzén returned to Shanghai Fashion Week last season and are busy selling out most of their offerings during the pre-collection calendar and adding novelty to the show’s context in the form of artisanal styles. It’s a feedback loop that works and seems to keep them going. The wind of change is blowing in the right direction for Samuel Guì Yang.