The Beijing-based designer Sean Suen discovered an fascinating center floor between classical music and Chinese language folklore for his spring 2026 present on the Cujas Library in Paris.
The designer’s standard clear aesthetic with a contact of sci-fi affect obtained vaguely tousled with Debussy’s daydream piano solo “Rêverie,” in addition to Ning Caichen, a scholar-turned-debt collector most famously portrayed by the late Leslie Cheung within the 1987 cult movie “A Chinese language Ghost Story,” which was tailored from a chapter in “Liaozhai,” a set of classical tales from the Qing Dynasty.
The elongated proportions, the exaggerated scarf lapels, the square-toe sneakers, and the dramatic rolled-up hats may come off as an edgy tackle conventional males’s tailoring to the Western viewers, however a Sinophile would know all these are primarily based on Ning’s scholar outfit within the film, through which he fell for an attractive ghost who at one level needed him useless.
Debussy got here into play within the type of a medium — a dream, possibly — that enabled Suen to be free from any constraints throughout assortment improvement, as he tried to visualise summary melodies by way of the language of clothes.
The dream appeared fairly an journey, as outcomes seen between the bookshelves within the library had been a mixture of neatly tailor-made fits, handled leather-based jackets, brilliant knits, in addition to enjoyable objects like cocoon-shaped shorts, wrap skirts with letter motifs, and scarves worn as capes.
