Rok Hwang gave vent to his romantic tendencies while he was working on fall in his studio in Seoul. “I think since last season I’ve been exploring something that was a little bit more quiet. Sitting draping and playing around with patterns in my studio, deciding what I like, and being a little more Zen.”
Hwang has always been a latter-day deconstructionist, a chopper-up of trenches, suits, and corsetry whose themes have ranged around office dressing, cocktail-wear, and his memories of the 1990s and 2000s in Texas and London. This time, his instincts led him to a more free-wheeling kind of collage of disparate elements—a renaissance mannerist painting of a male angel, which he had reproduced in a tapestry and on prints, long sheepskin-lookalike coats, raw-edged tailoring, fragments of Victoriana, and military fatigues. It was also the first Rokh show that included so many men’s looks.
Though they work continents apart, Hwang’s collection bore a few odd similarities to Jonathan Anderson’s Loewe. Toward the end of the show, there was a swagged antique floral dévoré print dress creating an interesting volume, but paired with gray, fairly ordinary seeming coordinates. Anderson’s point was to look at the collections of the wealthy, which Hwang’s tapestry would also fit. Disconcertingly, however, when it came, he draped the fabric over the head and body of a model, making holes for the eyes.
Hwang didn’t describe his intentions, except to say obliquely how much he enjoys seeing people in the street wearing Rokh. “And they all look different from each other, and different from the way I’ve shown it. People love to adapt what I do.”
His experimentation doesn’t always make for an easily-understood narrative or silhouettes, although they were beautiful when he concentrated on draping a rose-bud printed ‘granny’s bed-quilt’ as a doubled-up cocoon coat, wrapping and knotting creamy lace layers over a traily Victoriana petticoat, and covering coats with naive garlands of crocheted flowers. But it’s healthy for designers to allow themselves a creative outlet—as Demna put it this week, “creativity is the new luxury.”