Jamie Wei Huang – A New Direction But The Same Beauty

Posted on October 6, 2019 by Melanie in Uncategorized // 0 Comments

“I think this season we really just let it drive, this season it’s about the collection, but it’s not about the collection as well, it’s about the process of creating it”.

I’m backstage after Jamie Wei Huang has shown her SS20 collection in the bright and spacious Palm Court, I took a few moments and let others go before me so that I could process the looks. There were so many elements that were familiar to those of us who have avidly followed the career of the very talented Taiwanese designer, but at the same time this was a departure into something new, something bold and less structured, a confident evolution for the London based label and its leader.

Gone were the tighter lines, the perfection of the folds, the absoluteness of the patterns and in its place a release of the graceful rigidity, here was a softness and soothing floating textiles, a vision of mild imperfections that produced something equally stunning, Wei Huang gave me some insight into the thought process behind it.

“What we thought was with the hairdressers we work with, even the interns we work with, when they are professional, they are obsessing. We spend days and days deciding is this piece better in 0.8 or 1mm, 0.2mm differences can take ages, its more about that internal up and down so it’s different from the previous seasons. We’re not going to talk about OCD (the name of the collection) too much, but when you’ve actually been through the process of how you want it to be done, I think that everyone has that part”.

Intrigued by the new approach I was keen to explore the idea of the collection a little more and how that manifested itself into the creative process. After so many seasons I’ve come to know that for designer’s evolution is natural yet critical, creatives are like sharks they must always keep moving.

“We didn’t really decide the silhouette, we let the material decide itself, so that is the best solution we can find in terms of shapes and lines being put together, this might be meaningless for everyone else but it means everything for us and is kind of the point of what we do and how we put this collection together”.

This feels not so much a departure, but part of a journey, Jamie Wei Huang has always been an innovator, and in the almost amphitheatre like marbled hall of Palm Court the footsteps on the stone floor resonated as much as the collection did.

Images – Simon Armstrong