Cinephile Huishan Zhang’s weakness for Hollywood romance is well established, but the designer has a taste for rivalry too. For fall, he was captivated by the seriously scandalous love affair between the Italian director Roberto Rossellini and the icy Swedish movie star Ingrid Bergman, which, uh, erupted on the volcanic-island set of the 1950 movie Stromboli. Rossellini’s abandoned lover, the equally explosive Italian actor Anna Magnani, emptied a plate of pasta over his head when he denied the infidelity. She then made a rival movie on a neighboring island titled Volcano.
It’s not hard to see why this clash of classic Nordic beauty and volatile Mediterranean charisma proved irresistible to Zhang. Thankfully, he resisted the impulse to literalize the tension by opting to turn out a perfectly pleasing collection that conformed to his precise, pretty vernacular. His A-list clients will love the Golden Age gown in a metallic-pink polyester he had specially developed with a Japanese supplier to hold its shape and shine just as much as his C-suite executive loyalists will opt for his recycled Japanese wool tailoring, several pieces of which were embroidered with sequins and tulle. There were options for the light-hearted party girl too in the sheer embroidered dresses layered over lightweight silver jacquard minis.
If at times the collection lacked the bite of the love affair that prompted a US senator to denounce Bergman in a speech delivered in the Senate as “a powerful influence for evil,” well, you can hardly blame Zhang. As London Fashion Week celebrates its 40th birthday while at the same time conceding that the 2020s remain a stunningly inauspicious decade for independent designers, Zhang is the rare former NEWGEN-sponsored name whose business is in good health. Just this past month, his international team—which numbers 35 people in China and 10 in London—whipped up a last-minute, custom caped confection for the Oscar-nominated actor Lily Gladstone. It was one of the many successes they toasted at a raucous Chinese New Year celebration held in London earlier in the week. “There are lots of emotions woven into our dresses. It’s important to celebrate that,” Zhang said.
