Louis Shengtao Chen was topped the winner of the 2024 version of the Vogue China Vogue Fund final October. Since, he’s taken a step again to, as they are saying, get all his geese in a row. He stepped away from the runway for spring 2025, and put collectively a lookbook (and an excellent assortment at that). He skipped the autumn 2025 season altogether, and now he’s again to launch his first-ever pre-collection, a two-punch effort to broaden his industrial footprint and kit up for the spring 2026 season and his return to the runway.
Chen stated that this assortment is a type of “half one” to the primary occasion coming within the fall. If that’s the case, he put collectively a somewhat appetizing amuse-bouche: semi-sheer tailor-made coats in powdery pastel colours, cutesy floral separates with funky however cool askew seams and cascading ruffles, and a few fabulous multi-layered pencil skirts and slips with full godets that make them as flattering as they’re bizarre. Ditto a few balloon-hemmed skirts and trousers, its prime layers sheer and the beneath ones reduce in white for a vintage-y x-ray look. In some, he’s even encapsulated strings of pearls inside.
Chen cuts a imply costume; the clear proof seen in prim and correct embroidered tea-length ball robes and skirts or sinuously reduce sheaths. The novelty this season is tailoring, a class Chen has considerably explored previously however by no means wholly dedicated to. Right here he’s made elongated waistcoats, some correct workplace trousers, and an important single-button blazer.
Chen has been a very fascinating designer to observe since his debut. His exuberant type and infrequently explosive, mind-boggling silhouettes have made him a darling of the Shanghai Vogue Week scene, but it surely usually left his followers questioning which elements of his world they’d truly be capable to purchase into. This previous 12 months has clearly afforded him a newfound maturity—he’s saved his delightfully bizarro signature type however discovered methods of constructing it commercially viable. These are cool, enjoyable garments. Ought to he make the bounce to Paris in the course of the upcoming ready-to-wear season, as he’s beforehand hinted, he ought to ensure that to proceed down this path.