Was it a carnival or a film screening; a techno rave or a chill club night? It’s always hard to tell with Xander Zhou, a fixture of China’s fashion industry and a must-see at Shanghai Fashion Week. A year ago he fashioned his runway show into an intergalactic symposium. Last season, it was a couture-esque salon show at a venue stylized as a museum gallery.
This time around, he created a time-warping carnival that zigzagged from Zhou’s singular brand of neo-futurism to courtly Medieval Europe and back again for an after-party—Zhou loves a good night out—which he hosted at Shanghai’s trendy System club with a lineup of his favorite DJs. Despite his eye for grandiosity, Zhou has a touch for making the most elaborate feel personal. His idea this season was to look at theaters and ballets of yore to craft a collection based on their archetypes: harlequins, courtesans, jousters, dancers, et al.
He singled out the ballet de cour and the commedia dell’arte as two somewhat opposing traditions he borrowed from to transport them to his own imagined future: “They were integral elements of European pre-Lent carnivals,” he said, explaining that ballets were “displays of the monarchy’s power,” staged in royal venues with nobles as heroes or deities, while the comedies were performed by professional actors with bandits and satire at the forefront. Zhou is a well-researched designer whose concepts rival academic theses. He’s built his runway collections with the futu.
