Xander Zhou is curious about the future. He sees it as a continuous cycle, warped like a ball of wool where space and time intersect over and over again, morphing into various iterations. “Whether these interactions lead to the ‘past’, ‘present’ or ‘future’ is difficult to determine,” he says after his Spring/Summer 2025 show, “So futurism in my eyes can have many forms. Every collection projects a new imagination of the future that I have, or an assumption based on my observations of reality.” For this collection, he goes back to the nutcracker sleeves and ruffles from the outfits of early modern traditions of performance at the royal court, with ballet de cour, and improvised street skits with commedia dell’arte.
Uniforms are something Zhou had delved into for his S/S 2016 collection, designing formals for an extraterrestrial office, playing on how officewear conceals and homogeniwes and instead adding nipple-revealing cutouts and underwear as outerwear. “When it comes to uniforms or specific occasions, many people have strong preconceived ideas and stereotypes in their minds,” he notes. “What I like most is to get rid of the attributes and context of the original image. I am deconstructing perceptions, or creating new ‘surreal’ combinations, where elements that shouldn't exist together appear in the same space and combination.” Here, two performance worlds clash as sturdy cutouts recall the ballet tutu styled with dell’arte’s elongated poulaines.
If one imagines royal courts as offices, it’s easy to follow the characters Zhou has devised, like the court jesters, with harlequin masks in the character’s usual checkered print, paired with a Chaplinesque cane – one of them is even in a modern-day shirt and vest, moving towards Zhou’s imagination of the future, where various timelines fuse together like a jigsaw puzzle – bowcore from present day is not ignored. The cane takes a more serious supportive role the more authoritative the garment gets – add to that an imposing shako, and you’ve got yourself the coworker you’d want to avoid in the corridor! He’s clearly fascinated by armoury, using it repeatedly from his last collection, particularly as he sees its protective aspects as being a precursor to integrating the machine with the human, where both function as one. Here, the office is a battlefield.
For Zhou, the most exciting part of designing is the feeling of creation. “The inspiration for this collection includes Alice in Wonderland that was lying around in the place where I was staying while on vacation in Ibiza, as well as Bauhaus, and many, many more elements,” he explains. When asked where he situates himself between the creative and the commercial, Zhou admits he feels more like a creative, using fashion design to express himself. “Each collection is like an art project for me, shaping characters and designing clothes for these characters to form the content of the project,” he says. “I have never been worried about how to position myself – the balance (naturally) presents itself. In the storylines I create, some need more dramatic looks, while others need more down-to-earth looks. These down-to-earth looks naturally become the types of clothing that can be commercialised.”
Thus, he sees each collection as a series of sci-fi short films. “You see certain characters evolve,” he says – so he’s been using elements from his past shows repeatedly, like arrows and masks – for S/S 2024, transparent android masks covered the whole face, almost recalling Undercover’s F/W 15 face masks, with a built-in smile, forcing the wearer to eerily hold their smile. Now masks remove the face completely, albeit still conveying emotions.
The use of Chinese influences is subtle, like mapping the acupuncture points in his F/W 2020 show, which begin to look like GPS points – which in this collection is mapped into Big Dipper-esque constellations in the sky. “The same element can be interpreted differently at different stages of my work,” he says. “The repeated use of the same element is a continuous editing and deduction of my design logic. I also like to capture the subtle sense between certain similar forms, for example, the acupuncture points as well as astrology, the subtle connection between some ancient Chinese philosophies and the cutting-edge science of today. This is also my sense of the entire universe, a connection of energies.”
To no one’s surprise, Zhou loves to read. “I've recently been reading How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics by N. Katherine Hayles,” he signs off.
