“The collection took a darker turn this season, as I’ve been very emotional recently, feeling super angry at the world,” said Chet Lo. Honestly, mood. The London-based, New York born-and-raised designer obviously isn’t alone in his sentiment, but he’s among the few designers in London this season to directly cite the deteriorating sociopolitical contexts on both sides of the Atlantic as a jumping off point for their collection.
The darker turn that Lo spoke of made itself felt in his notably sombre palette, which largely comprised shadowy hues of navy, burgundy, black and gray—a notable shift for a designer who has essentially built their reputation on a penchant for outré spiked knit silhouettes in fluoro and candy pop hues. It also made itself felt in the conceptual drive of the collection—the reappraisal, and ultimately the reclamation, of chinoiserie.
“The reason I wanted to approach it here is because chinoiserie is the product of French colonialism in East Asia,” the designer said. “So I wanted to take that, twist it and bring it back into an Asian lens,” taking ham-fisted Orientalist tropes and inverting them to convincing effect. Print was a key means of achieving this effect—ribbed mohair separates bore tiger stripe graphics that were in fact the result of taking images of “western depictions of Asian people—the eyes and the face specifically—and blowing them up” to mimic the big cat motif. And speaking of blowing things up, the ditsy florals decorating pencil skirts, ties and bandeau tops with single draped sleeves were in fact abstracted renderings of images of explosions. “I wanted to evoke this weird sense of juxtaposition, where from afar you think something looks a certain way, but you realize the meaning is much deeper on closer inspection,” said Lo.
While that objective was slightly let down by the plain durian knit dresses that seemed to add little to the narrative beyond a first-degree connotation of spikiness, it was still spiriting to see a designer be uncompromising in their willingness to invoke crucial discussions taking place beyond the runway. “Obviously the world is really topsy-turvy at the moment, and when you’re just looking at the news and how awful it feels, it’s hard not to bring that into the work,” said Lo. “I think when you have a platform, it’s always important to just speak what you can and say your own truth and be really confident in that—I’m very happy to do that, at least.”
