Rok Hwang’s place of escape turns out to be just next door to what might be other peoples’ idea of a delirious nightmare. He smiled, over a Zoom call, that reading Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (which Tim Burton made into a movie in 2016) had given him hours of childlike imaginary-world fun during lockdown. It was, he said, that innocent feeling he wanted to convey to viewers of his spring collection—a strange prologue for the unveiling of an epic-scale video in which an army of women stomp through a landscape which is wreathed in fog, and lit like the end of days.
By daylight in Hwang’s London studio, it was easier—through the requisite computer screen—to see closeups of his professionally crafted goth-punk-Victoriana dresses, trenchcoat, and kilt hybrids. All the sweeping ankle-length shapes with lots of ruffled layers of chiffon in them, the ballooning sleeves, the exaggerated lace collars, and the floral jacquards are quite beautifully made. Strip the looks of the black leather harnesses—because really, what do they add, even as styling pieces?—and there’s a pretty, romantic collection of prairie dresses with cutaway corsetry, an aesthetic not far off Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen territory.
Hwang says his sales have been holding up, despite the pandemic, which is obviously good news to hear from any designer. Perhaps that’s what gave him the confidence to invest in staging such a large production of 52 looks—numerically outstripping the likes of Erdem and even Louis Vuitton. The sight of so many models, convened somewhere mysterious—was it a quarry, a desert, somewhere by the coast?—couldn’t block out the question of how a young designer like Hwang could’ve made that possible in the time of COVID. That’s something he wouldn’t say, insisting on keeping the location, even the country it was shot in, to himself. He didn’t want to interrupt the viewers’ enjoyment of his procession of “Night Wanderers,” he said. To his mind, they belong to another world.
