Ok What do St. Augustine de Canterbury, a corporate girlboss, and a raver creature of the night have in common? Time. Its passing, its unforgiving nature, and its propensity for promoting change and transformation. What they also have in common, at least within the confines of Shanghai Fashion Week and this one pocket of the Internet, is this CPlus Series collection.
Designer CT Liu explained backstage after his show that the goal was to harness the essence and power of time. Time, after all, is life’s one and only constant. “The idea is to show how abstract time can be presented tangibly,” said Liu. How he took this from abstract and esoteric into tangible and wearable was by zeroing in on his fabrics.
Liu aged and bleached denims, stained leathers and silks, and felted fur into cozy knits. He scanned jeans—with their creases, rips, and blemishes—and printed and overprinted them onto slinky dresses, and sinuously shirred bias strips of silk around the body to make sheaths that fell off his models as clothes do after a long day or an even longer night.
Altogether, the lineup carried a patina that made it feel lived in without losing its edge, something Liu confidently conjured up by offering a range of clothes made to cover every nook and cranny of a person’s life. There were office-ready sweaters, jackets, and tailored trousers; sexy going-out dresses, bodysuits, and micro mini skirts; and homebody hoodies, knits, and everything else in between. A tighter edit would have let Liu’s message come across with more impact, but what was clear is that this is a designer with a particular knack for making a covetable wardrobe staple. (Find it this season in a drapey leather jacket that wraps and buttons twice around the body, or in a silky lilac asymmetrical top, one of its sleeves draping from the neckline into the bodice.)
Liu closed his show with a run of glittery knitted dresses and separates. They were dressy with a side of hedonism, and the kind of pieces you want to wear on a night out—those you’ll hope will freeze time so you can savor them longer. It was St. Agustine who said that time manifests itself in our world through transformation, an idea Liu eloquently projected into his realization of this fall wardrobe.
