During last Paris Fashion Week Men, Korean fashion house Songzio presented its first ever co-ed collection. This is noteworthy itself, but ultimately the Spring/Summer 2025 collection bridges much more than gender. Creative director Jay Songzio identifies a spectrum, splits himself in two, and sprints towards both ends of it. Bright Star communicates its creator’s most central value: dualism. Are you a fan of utilitarian post-war style, all things leather, moto jackets, and everything black on black on black? This collection is for you. More in the baby pink-camp, lover of embossing and whimsical barbie-colored silk tulle? There is a place for you, too, at Songozio’s party.
Any spectator who found themself in the 9ème arrondissement last Friday, seated along Songzio’s Haussmann Boulevard runway, felt, first, lucky. And they were right to feel that way. Following ‘lucky’, they probably felt ‘confused.’ A head-to-toe black get up we’ve all seen: we saw it earlier at Rick Owens, Balenciaga does its own version, so does Margiela, and about a thousand others: and thank god they do. There’s nothing not to love about an ebony warrior—this school of fashion delivers the ominous sex appeal of the warrior, minus the war part: Fantastique! Black a color so fierce, post-war goth an aesthetic so powerful and ‘set in its ways’, a designer’s relationship with it is usually monogamous. But Songzio is hardly impressed by tradition—the Korean designer practices free love. He doesn’t worry that pink will detract from the seriousness of his work; He welcomes it with open arms, dyes his silk in it, and throws a glossy sheen on his pink pieces. The black can wait its turn.
When celebrating creative freedom, it is important that we distinguish breadth from plain old chaos. The territories charted by this collection, the breadth of genre, all of it works because, ultimately, Songzio is steadfast in his commitment to a grounding ideology. The same intention stands behind each piece—the designer just knows by this point that there are many ways of manifesting one vision. The collection’s title, Bright Star, comes from a series of aquarelle portraits of youthful boys with limitless wonders and pure imaginations. One of them, a star, which is actually painted directly onto some of the S/S 2025 pieces, stands as the iconography behind the entire collection. It is the North Star, never moving, always bright, and born to guide.
Founded in 1993, Songzio is no new kid on the block. Savvy designers and veteran craftsmen know their way around not just cotton and linen, but metallic meshes, heavy wools, thick tweeds, fluid silks, and wispy organzas. Knowing when to use what becomes the next question. The stiffness of dramatic cocoon shoulders and well-endowed bell-shaped sleeves give some of these pieces a statuesque appearance. This suggests that the designers have, indeed, perfected the use of material as a means by which to achieve their hefty structural ambitions.
Bright Star defies time—giant exaggerated sleeves are a head-nod to the padded shoulders of the eighties, but here they are bulbous as opposed to the pointy shoulders that once jutted out from the frames of Princess Diana, Madonna, and Celine Dion. We feel a particular fondness for the collection’s sandals, which breed Greek gladiator sandals with boxing boots. Just putting on these stompers probably takes upward of ten minutes. Such willingness to sacrifice time for the sake of art is at the center of the Songzio brand. With the Spring/Summer 2025 collections, intention- and artistry-forward fashion has reached its zenith.
