Amongst the feverish hurry of Paris fashion week, Rok Hwang cast a compelling, almost Film Noir atmosphere over his spring show. Spotlit from above, with jazz on the soundtrack, his collection created a small oasis of calm—the better to show his mid-2020s vision of what modern elegance means to his generation.
“It’s a world I want to live in—sophisticated but a bit edgy, avant-garde,” he said backstage, gesturing to a mood board that also took in menswear for the first time.
The down-lighting picked out the complexities of the draped, twisted, and cut-away tailoring—and the bondage-y trench coat straps—he’s established as the signifiers of his increasingly popular Rokh brand. His opening black jacket—literally carved open in the torso, to reveal an integral bra—was reprised again in an English country jacket form later. Looking back, this same jacket-pattern opened his spring 2023 show. Its recurrence has to be in response to what his customer-base is relating to, as part of the normalization of the post-pandemic wave of ‘naked’ dressing.
His is an evolved and elaborated style, now expertly dissected and reconfigured from classic building-blocks—the trench, the tailored suit, military uniform—intersected with dresses and lingerie. It’s somehow simultaneously pulled-together while almost brinking on falling apart; a highly considered top-to-toe proposition that also appears a bit louchely casual. “It’s a full wardrobe for work but something that’s sort of elevated, but also fun and twisted too,” Hwang said. This time, there were glamorous evening things wrapped into the lineup; halter necked dresses suspended on chains, one of them outlined in white crochet lace.
Hwang said he had a narrative holding all of it together: thinking about his aspirations as a student. “It’s a little bit of my youth, where my passion started—how I wanted to be a student at Central Saint Martins. That’s all I dreamed of,” he said. “A lot of things came together, but I wanted to sort of provoke that emotion, of being an art student. A little bit of a London attitude.”
A Korean who spent much of his childhood in the USA, Hwang’s dream did indeed come true—he took both his BA and MA at Central Saint Martins, graduated in 2010 (in the same class as Simone Rocha), and was immediately snapped up by Phoebe Philo, when she was planning her post-Chloé debut at Celine.
The men’s collection is a development by popular demand. “We’ve been quiet about it, but we’re selling to 133 stores globally. It’s been growing quite a lot, and there have been lots of requests coming for menswear.”
Every season, it’s a fuller Rokh picture (with squashy pouch bags for both men and women, too). No, he doesn’t shout much about it, but the loyal fans he’s gathering around him, as well as the attitude of the Rokh look put him on the same sort of generational wavelength as Jacquemus. Coming from a different place, yes, but going far.
