“There’s a change in pace of fantasy and taste.”
The opening line of Billy Idol’s 1983 hit “Flesh for Fantasy”—and its title—serve as a neat, if broad, summation of what New York fashion looks like right now. Just as Fashion Week was marked by a return to form, so designers brought attention back to the body. As insubstantial or skimpy as many of the revealing designs are, this sex craze in fashion is solid in its literalness.
Lùchen, which debuted for spring, takes a loftier, more conceptual approach to fashion that is more aligned with air.
The line, co-designed by Lu Chen and Jacky Luo, both of whom studied at Parsons, builds on the former’s unfinished (because of COVID) thesis. Chen says it was her mission to finish what she had started, and one can feel the seriousness and purposefulness of the team’s approach. The workmanship is meticulous and stands as a testament to skill and possibility. Chen rightly likens it to couture, but there’s a difference: None of the pieces are for sale. They are, rather, material explorations that serve as templates for the ready-to-wear line. This model is disruptive, especially within the context of American fashion history (which is in the spotlight because of the Costume Institute’s new exhibition). For decades, American buyers paid French houses for the right to reproduce Parisian designs, and Seventh Avenue was largely in the business of copying French fashion, which was considered more elevated, more cultured, more interesting, and more desirable than homegrown design. In contrast, Lùchen is self-reliant, conceptualizing and iterating on its own concepts and construction. And the team does this according to their own pace.
“The essence of our brand is about time,” says Chen. “Everything here really takes time to make, and we really think about the relationship between time and the body and the world… I feel like we have the mission to record the time by making the garment.” Accordingly, each piece comes with a tag that tracks its birthing and documents material sources and other details.
Chen seems interested in and comfortable with big concepts and unknowns. One might say that she want to break free from flesh and the boundaries that are set by the human body. “I feel like we’re always being boxed into a certain shape, which is our own human body shape,” she says. “Our mindset has been thinking how our own body functions… and we tend to give our own shape to anything we can imagine. We always attribute our own figures to the things we create, for example, we create the image of God using our own image… and we create robots and machinery using the structure of our bodies.” Her rebel yell? “I want to deconstruct and really overturn our mindset to try to anthropomorphize everything we create.”
Counterintuitively, Chen and Luo go about their revolution by focusing on construction, be it tailoring or flou. Some of the looks have an avian quality. There’s a suit in which real feathers are embedded into the fabric, and a dress made of endless strips of dyed fabric, carefully sewn and arranged by hand into a variegated pattern with a beak-like structure near the left shoulder and a cut-out back. A stunning gray coat-dress with two wing-like sleeves hanging like streamers from the back has a sort of Balenciaga-like austerity. Pleats have a winglike feeling, too. There are touches of Alexander McQueen and Ann Demeulemeester here, but the collection has a strong point of view, one that makes room for technology and considers identity. Upside-down skirts and fabric cover the faces of some of the models, one of whom holds a small camera. In one case, a print that incorporates pictures of the models who wear the clothes (which speak to community) is made into a dress that has “windows” of moving imagery.
Chen and Luo attempt to address the ephemerality and fluidity of time through their use of draping. Impermanence is something that their generation of designers has to deal with. Lùchen is built on the understanding that, like time, few things are static, even the human body.
