Chet Lo (Q2746)
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Chet Lo is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Chet Lo |
Chet Lo is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Mother knows best! Well, when it comes to dressing, Chet Lo’s certainly does. That much was clear from the designer’s heartfelt homage to his own, Mai-Wah Cheung, a formidable pioneer in New York City’s computer sciences industry. “In the 1990s, she was actually one of the first women in the city to study in the field,” Lo said proudly while backstage at a preview. “She then took the world by storm, going on to become the CIO of multiple companies,” including mass-media titan Univision.Climbing that sort of a career ladder takes composure, conviction, and grit—qualities, Lo noted, he’s glad to have inherited from her—not to mention a wardrobe that communicates at first glance. Meeting Ms. Cheung today, however, that isn’t the impression you’d necessarily glean: “She’s now done a complete 180 and really discovered her delicate side,” said her son. “She works as a schoolteacher and a painter—it’s such an inspiring change.”Accordingly, Lo’s collection contemplated this transition, articulating the delicate nuances of her character in cloth. Obvious 9-to-5 codes figured, but more compelling were the interpretations of her go-to cobalt plaids on gauzy shift dresses and a strapless column silhouette that translated the check in the designer’s signature durian knit. There was also clear evidence of Lo pushing the technique into more mature territory, most notably with a slick charcoal boatneck gown and as subtle panels running along the sleeves of a fitted wool shirt.Mai-Wah Cheung’s turn from corporate life was sweetly acknowledged by a pair of tank dresses that gently jingled with glass beads in the shapes of the fruit bowl medleys that inspire her painting practice. And the show’s opening look—a gossamer white gown bisected into sections in crisp gauze and an origami pleated rendition of Lo’s puckering—connoted the vulnerability that she’s come to perceive as a strength.Though Lo’s celebration of his mother’s emotional transition was born of homage, it also, in a sense, mirrored a transformation of the designer’s own. “I’m really tired of just creating these punky, crazy, club-kid clothes,” he said, “so this was me trying to elevate the brand and say something that’s really elegant—demure, even.” Granted, fans of the clubbier gear Lo has made a name with will find their appetites satiated by the body-cladding cropped polos and teensy bandeau skirts in glitched-out graphics—not delivering on this front would be a silly move, commercially speaking.
Signs of refinement were most apparent in notable developments with the wovens. Though there’s still room for refinement, a gray minidress with a jaunty cowl hood gestured toward territory that it would be great to see Lo pursue further. Its source of inspiration was, naturally, an image of the designer’s mother, a pinnacle of chic swaddled in a scarf.
13 September 2024
When Chet Lo was a kid growing up in New York City, he was enchanted by images of the Terracotta Army, the collection of thousands of funerary sculptures dating back two millennia unearthed by farmers in China’s Shaanxi province in the 1970s. Most fascinating, he remembers thinking, was how the processes of oxidation, fire, and dehydration had transformed them along the way—their original, colorful lacquered surfaces fading to the earthy hues we see today. For Lo, that process of deterioration is exactly what lends them their exquisite, poetic beauty. “I always thought of the Terracotta Army as a symbol of strength and resilience,” he said backstage after his show today. “I was bullied a lot in school, and so this collection was really about putting on your armor to go out and face the world.”To achieve this, Lo imagined the sculptures as if reawakening from their slumber, the clay shaken off to reveal a steelier surface underneath. And if there’s one thing Lo knows, it’s how to wake people up: the show began with the space being plunged into darkness, followed by a thunderous torrent of traditional Japanese war drums booming out across the runway. The opening look was as arresting as the soundtrack: a tweedy crop top and trousers that twisted at the knee were overlaid with what at first appeared to be a kind of crimson snakeskin print, that Lo explained afterwards served to resemble the crackling surfaces of his imagined terracotta soldiers as they woke from their slumber. “That’s why we had the metallic tears [as makeup] too,” he added. “This idea of them kind of cracking and melting.”Naturally, Lo’s signature durian popcorn top spikes came in a variety of iterations: running along the sides of hoodies and trousers and fishtail skirts, or streaked down the back of a top for a note of stegosaurus chic. But it was his ventures into more elevated, mature pieces that felt most compelling: a series of looks crafted from a feather-light metallic knit lace carried a gorgeous shimmer, offering both a figure-hugging flattery and a sense of practicality that recalled the kind of beloved Issey Miyake pleated piece you can scrunch up in your suitcase and still wear on a night out in another city—no ironing needed.A series of diaphanous knit gowns featured panels of gossamer-thin laddering sliced into skirts and running up the lengths of the arms, while the dazzling final look was covered in hand-sewn metal dragon scales inspired by historical Chinese armory.
Once the model walked past, however, the cheeky bumster cut of the back of the dress was revealed. (Following Ludovic de Saint Sernin’s Mapplethorpe-inspired collection in New York last week, bumsters are already emerging as something of a trend this season; it will be interesting to see whether they factor into Seán McGirr’s vision for McQueen next month.) The theme of this collection may have stemmed from the designer’s childlike wonder at the mysteries of the Terracotta Army, but you can’t do Lo without a bit of skin, after all.
16 February 2024
The title of Chet Lo’s latest collection was 鹹濕: a pair of Cantonese characters that roughly translate assalty,pornographic, ordirty. The ambiguity of those words in combination was very much the point: While Chet Lo’s clothes have always held a certain brand of off-kilter sex appeal (not least for the figure-hugging properties of his signature clingy mesh popcorn technique), this season he fully leaned into the brand’s racier side.But not in the way you might initially expect. “I was reflecting on my sexuality, especially as a queer person of color, and how I never saw Asian people represented in porn, or at least not in a way that wasn’t fetishized,” he said. “The title might translate as something perverted and dirty, but it’s also a story of sexual liberation. Sex is natural, but I grew up being so ashamed of it, so being able to embrace it through my designs has been a real turning point.”To do so, Lo lifted from some very literal source material, and then turned it inside out. Namely, he took prints from ancient Chinese erotic art and Japanese shunga—an artistic tradition that reached its height during the Edo period, and often featured depictions of same-sex couples—then abstracted them as halftones across satin devoré tops or overlaid onto knits. Elsewhere, a handful of looks featured lace-up details inspired by the Japanese erotic rope play shibari, culminating in a intricate woven breastplate inspired by Chinese knotting. (Particularly ingenious was the hair, by Anna Cofone, which took the shibari influence and transformed it into sculptural tentacles that towered about the models’ heads.)Aside from these friskier details, there were some newly elevated looks in the mix, including an especially gorgeous chiffon and silk devoré bias-cut gown in cornflower blue with a swishy scarf attached that rippled behind the model as she walked. “I know the brand started off being very edgy and Gen Z, but I really want to develop it into something that has a luxury feel,” said Lo. “I want to make clothes for a whole variety of people.” If the front row was anything to go by, Lo’s popcorn dresses remain a perennial favorite—but he proved he has plenty of other tricks up his sleeve, too.
18 September 2023
Chet Lo began today’s show with the most shocking thing he could possibly think of: He sent out a look in head-to-toe black. Shocking because the 26-year-old designer is best known for his high-energy popcorn tops and party dresses in ebullient acids and neons. Lo still had a cheeky trick up his sleeve, mind: Throughout the show, models turned to flash their tongues at the front row like high-fashion iguanas, coated in Crayola-bright food dyes by beauty maverick Isamaya Ffrench.It turns out the reason for Lo’s more subdued approach (outside of those flickering tongues, anyway) was a very personal one. “I was diagnosed with depression a while back—which is a good thing, as I’m now able to treat it—but it was a strange experience when I realized this is not how life is supposed to be,” Lo said. Hence the collection’s title of Bioluminescence, with the reassuring glow of deep sea creatures serving as a metaphor for the light that guided Lo back from the darkness. (“I remember seeing the ocean light up while on holiday as a kid, and it’s one of the most magical memories of my life,” Lo added with endearing sincerity, noting that he’s also a fully paid-up nature documentary obsessive.)Given Lo’s prior allegiance to an early internet-adjacent aesthetic of eye-popping graphics and bright pastels, it’s easy to forget that a love for nature—extravagant flowers in particular—has always been woven through his clothes. This time, it came in the form of finely ribbed knits printed with shadowy lotus flowers, or the speckled, shell-like patina of his two-tone dresses. Meanwhile, to balance out the absence of his usual arresting colors, Lo looked to texture instead, revealing a handful of other technical tricks along the way. Most striking were the skirts and dresses with felted wool fused onto silk as if sprayed or dipped in liquid, designed by Lo to resemble a “descent into the depths.”With his first standalone show last season, Lo solidified his position as a favorite among Gen Z club kids and pop stars looking to channel a little Y2K pizzazz; this time around, he set out to offer more sophisticated riffs on his staple pieces too. By doing so, Lo cleverly proved that there’s a fastidiousness behind his innate sense of fun.
18 February 2023
Chet Lo’s stratospheric rise over the past few years has been fueled, in part, by his popularity among a certain contingent of Gen Z idols. (His signature spiky, sheer knitwear is regularly spotted on the likes of Dua Lipa, Doja Cat, and Kylie Jenner.) To wit, the front row at the New York–born, London-based designer’s debut solo show today was packed with at least a dozen of the latter city’s underground nightlife fixtures, all decked out in his sherbet-hued popcorn tops and skirts from head to toe.They may have got something of a shock, though, when the zen atmosphere of Lo’s runway prelude—the darkened show space scented with burning incense, and accompanied by the soothing sounds of a gong bath—ended abruptly, as bright-white lights flipped on to a thundering techno soundtrack. (So bracing was the transition that a few attendees visibly jumped.) Yet it was a neat introduction to the joyful clash of cultures that underpins Lo’s aesthetic and makes him more than just the creator of an undeniable It piece—and his chopped-and-screwed blend of Y2K raver chic mixed with playful nods to his East Asian heritage was expressed here in its most fully realized form yet.The sound bath intro may have been a more literal reference to Lo’s cultural background, but his upbringing was woven through the collection elsewhere in subtler ways, too. Inspired by a Buddhist tale Lo’s father would recount to him as a child, in which a sea of arrows are shot in the Buddha’s direction only to metamorphose into flowers, Lo added a series of clingy knit looks with curved cutouts intended to create a slashed effect inspired by the marks left by whizzing arrows. (As a more subdued riff on his prickly durian fruit textures, anyone drawn to Lo’s vision—but not quite bold enough to wear his more outré pieces—will find succor here.)That’s not to say Lo didn’t also indulge his more flamboyant instincts, most notably in the accessories department. His eye for topsy-turvy proportions shone through in a series of Chinese conical hats rendered in his signature thistly fabrics, while balloon-like bags were slung over models’ shoulders like enormous, barbed medieval clubs. Another homage to Lo’s childhood spent accompanying his parents to temples came in the lotus flower motifs abstracted across ribbed separates, and—in a one-two punch of spectacular closing looks—embedded as gloopy, gelatinous embellishments pinned to sheer white gowns and wreathing the models’ hair.
It was cheering to see Lo evolve and present a broader, more robust offering this season; a clear foundation for the future of his brand. But as the penultimate show of this season’s London Fashion Week, Lo’s riotous energy, celebration of the city’s subcultures, and willingness to lean a little bonkers also captured what the British capital’s fashion scene does best—even in the face of the uncertainty prompted by the period of national mourning over the past 10 days. Taking a sprint down the runway at the end of the show, Lo’s club-kid acolytes erupted into a chorus of approval—one that was entirely deserved.
20 September 2022