Kwaidan Editions (Q4968)
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Kwaidan Editions is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Kwaidan Editions |
Kwaidan Editions is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Léa Dickely and Hung La consider their new Kwaidan Editions collection a reset. Having built a reputation for pop colors, they stripped most of them away for fall. Instead, they pursued a monochrome look, in shades of beige, gray, and black. But if this was a collection of mostly neutrals, it wasn’t neutered. The strain of kink that underlines their work has started to attract the attention of likeminded creators—the artists Isabelle Albuquerque and Heidi Bucher were on their moodboard, and they name-checked Louise Bonnet.Reset or not, they’re doubling down on their trademark sense of provocation. A new logo, jacquarded onto pencil skirts and knit into fine gauge sweaters, was lifted, Dickely explained, from ’70s packaging of bedsheets, of all things. And there was more latex than ever: for shirt-and-tie kits (sold together), blazers and maxi skirts, and a thicker version that they printed with a wallpaper flower pattern and cut into a trench.At the same time, they’re exploring other textures. A month ago Dickely and La launched the new label Lu’u Dan; it explores Asian masculinity through the lenses of Japanese street photography and Hong Kong crime films, among other things. Its more accessible price point and focus on menswear has freed them up to explore more precious materials here, including the fuzzy alpaca of a tailored coat, flocked jersey on second-skin turtlenecks good for layering or going solo, and floral printed velvets. “We dug into luxury,” Dickely said, “and we wanted a high level of craft.” A light blue pantsuit puts the spotlight on their craft; it’s sharply cut, with strong shoulders and a shaped waist on the double-breasted jacket with leg-elongating trousers. It’d make an excellent gallery opening look, though Albuquerque, whose work has such carnal overtones, might prefer a latex shirt dress with built-in bra cups.
1 March 2022
Spring 2022 is the final collection in Kwaidan Editions’s lockdown triptych, in which Hung La and Léa Dickely have explored the comforts and the kinks of home. The husband-and-wife partners hope to come back to Paris Fashion Week next season, but the months spent in isolation in the U.K., where they live, has been a productive time.Some designers emerged from COVID less clear about who they are, waffling between leisurewear one season and club clothes the next, for example. Dickely and La are the opposite. They like tailoring, floral prints (often with a vintage look), and latex; the thing that’s changed over the course of the past three seasons is that their sensibilities have grown more extreme.One outfit in the new look book, which Dickely shot in a “trapped in time” house on the outskirts of London, combines a black latex button-down, black latex flares, and a black latex apron. Fetish meets function. “We wanted something a little less subtle,” Dickely said over Zoom. “We went all in, full latex with no shame about it.” That head-to-toe look is an outlier, but their use of the material took many forms: a butcher’s apron that they layered over a ’70s-ish shirt and pants utilized a thicker version of the material, while a trench was constructed with a thinner type in baby pink that you’d swear was silk before doing a double take and realizing otherwise. Another coat was cut in rubberized black cotton with a laser-etched flower pattern. It’s a striking piece, exemplary of the elevated fabric play they did this season—see also: a crumpled silk flower-print top and skirt.The Kwaidan duo has carved a cool little niche for themselves. When they reemerge on the runway or in a presentation format next season, fashion watchers who haven’t been paying close attention will rediscover a brand whose point of view has grown more focused and compelling over the course of this crisis.
29 September 2021
This has been a year of domestic pleasures, but that means different things for different people. Hung La and Léa Dickely of Kwaidan Editions have done their fair share of cooking and cleaning up, like the rest of us. But in their collection and in the images Dickely has taken to document it, they’ve also been exploring the world of fetish. A couple of T-shirts in the new look book call back to the 1970s cult magAtomage, an “underground bible” for “early devotees of leather, rubber, and vinyl,” according to the Amazon description of the book,Dressing for Pleasure, that anthologizes it.Dickely and La were flirting with the taboo in their seasons on the runway, luring the audience to an underground garage where red lights pulsed in the haze from a smoke machine, as a means of conjuring the illegal parties of their adolescence, for example. But it’s only been since quarantine that they’ve spotlighted the fetish aspect of their work. Latex plays a starring role in the new collection, on second-skin tops, pencil skirts, and sharp trenches. These are juxtaposed with slip dresses in glossy silk and lace and tailored separates in upholstery prints and jacquards. The retro interiors of Dickely’s location shoot—itself a callback to the DIY images in those groundbreakingAtomageissues—hint at hidden carnality.In her early days,Vivienne Westwood made much of the material inAtomagemagazine, too. But Kwaidan Editions works a different angle, and you don’t need to be a connoisseur of kink to appreciate the ’90s inflections of their streamlined tailoring and slinky shirt- and slip-dresses.
3 March 2021
One of the ideas that has vibrated down the Zoom calls with designers this season is what a clarifying experience the COVID-19 crisis has been. Painful and challenging, but also clarifying. Coming out the other side, collections are not just more concise, but also truer to their creators’ intent. Léa Dickely and Hung La of Kwaidan Editions are among this cohort.“It was just the two of us in our house,” La said of their quarantine. “It was really introspective; we looked at everything we did. We felt it was important to dig into what we started.” Dickely added: “We didn’t know if shops were going to pay, if factories were going to open. All we had to focus on was what’s next. We put boards together of what really matters to us.” The boards include environments they find inspiring—in this case, Dickely’s grandmother’s house—and pieces from previous season that they identified as brand icons: a handmade tie-dye tee, a pantsuit in a brilliant shade of red, an almost trad plaid coat, and vinyl separates.Kwaidan Editions stands for cool tailoring, often in electric color or bold retro prints. But an erotic undercurrent pulses through the collection, too, seen in vinyl bra tops worn under sheer knits, lace-edged slips, and the veiling of other dresses, which treads a demure/debauched line. The collection’s lone T-shirt features an image pulled from a vintage copy of JapanesePlayboy.Dickely shot the photographs herself in a house outside London that looks like it hasn’t been touched since the ’70s. Its funky carpets and floral upholstery connect the images to the pictures of her grandmother’s house on the Kwaidan mood board. Here’s another way that the pandemic and the limitation of the lockdowns have benefited designers like her. With their clashing prints and off-kilter intimacy, these photos paint a better picture of Dickely and what turns her crank than a runway ever could.
30 September 2020
In the business of independent fashion, time might as well be measured in dog years. And that makes Kwaidan Editions’s three-year anniversary something of a milestone. Like many of their peers, Léa Dickely and Hung La are faced with an industry increasingly in flux. In just a matter of months, two of New York’s biggest retail institutions—Barneys and Opening Ceremony—disappeared from the shopping landscape last year. Now the ongoing coronavirus crisis is threatening to send the current season into a tailspin, with many buyers fleeing Paris Fashion Week for fear of quarantine.Dickely and La are taking a sensible, keep-calm-and-carry-on approach in the face of uncertainty. To better weather the storm, they’ve clarified the division of labor, with La unofficially shouldering the role of CEO and Dickely focusing on design. Speaking backstage before the show, Dickely described the mood of the new collection in terms of a woman taking center stage, a fitting metaphor for the brand’s new strategy.She cited PJ Harvey as a reference, a woman who is relatively unsung in the pantheon of ’90s style icons. You could see her influence in the slim-cut drop-shoulder satin button-downs in high-visibility ruby red and cobalt blue. On the flip side of that was stealth, chic daywear, including a smartly cut beige trench and clingy nylon shirting printed with Dickely’s subtle hand-drawn florals.In a relatively short space of time, Kwaidan Editions has assembled a roster of signature pieces that includes cool yet reliable tailoring. Their wide-leg pants and slightly oversized Crombie coats have been a repeat hit, refreshed from season to season with Dickely’s good-taste-bad-taste sense of color and fabrication. (In the case of fall, it was lime green and latex.) Where other young designers rely on editorial excitement to gather momentum, Dickely and La are beating their own path with quiet consistency.
29 February 2020
After last season’s subterranean show, Léa Dickely and Hung La were in a brighter mood for Spring. They set the tone for their show in Paris this afternoon with a runway that was flooded with natural light.The London-based duo is beginning to carve out a distinctive vocabulary for their brand with their thought-provoking sense of color and elongated, ’90s-style tailoring. Georgina Grenville was among the top models who helped define that look first time around, famously starring in several of Tom Ford’s ad campaigns for Gucci. She made a surprise appearance at the show today, dressed in a cream two-piece suit, a pale yellow polo, and pointy-square-toe mules that echoed those bygone proportions.Dickely and La loosened up the rigid outerwear of Fall with easy trench coats that came imbued with an extra dose of cool thanks to chain belts made in collaboration with Himo Martin of the jewelry label Pearls Before Swine. Industrial accessories have been all the rage lately, but the Kwaidan pair managed to mark theirs with subtle details; think, hoop earrings engraved with the work of American lyricist Dory Previn and chunky chokers dipped in red latex. The kinky fabric showed up in the ready-to-wear too, most notably on the Pepto pink coated denim jackets, though it would be hard to imagine the latex slip dresses finding a place in the real world. The figure-hugging jersey dresses and waist-cinching jersey blazers were altogether more believable and spoke to a body-conscious mood that’s come into focus for Spring on both sides of the pond.The pair behind Kwaidan Editions are part of a new generation of young designers staking their claim on the Paris fashion scene. Though Dickely and La clearly have the technical chops to make it, figuring out how to connect with a global community on a deeper level will be their next big challenge.
1 October 2019
Léa Dickely and Hung La of Kwaidan Editions held their show in the bowels of an underground parking lot in the 11th Arrondissement today, a fitting location for a brand that’s quickly becoming synonymous with stealth sophistication. Red lights flickered through a haze of smoke, evoking the forbidden air of an all-night rave, as buyers and editors hovered in standing-room-only formation along the runway.Turns out the London-based designers had all manner of subterranean activities on the brain when they conceived of Fall, including the illegal dance parties of their youth. (For La, who describes himself as a “grumpy old raver,” they took place in abandoned warehouses in Washington, D.C.; for Dickely, it was disused barns in rural France.) That teenage angst was simmering under the surface of the collection from the get-go, in the exaggerated wide-leg trousers and the all-seeing-eye prints on skintight turtleneck tees that riffed on ’90s techno flyer art.On the flip side, a more adult yet equally taboo influence: undercover agents. Dickely and La had been binge-watching spy movies, including Francis Ford Coppola’sThe ConversationandThe Lives of Others, a German film that explores the surveillance techniques of the Stasi. The designers’ research prompted a bigger discussion around the endless shape-shifting that is expected of women as they move through their lives. A mission that can seem impossible: How to navigate the world with a quiet sense of grace while being constantly scrutinized?La and Dickely’s response toyed with the line between the professional and the perverse. The best tailoring came with vaguely 1940s dimensions, billowy through the leg and long on the body, layered up with butterfly collared shirting.There’s been a darker mood rolling through the collections all season, and the lean, black, faux leather pantsuits captured that foreboding vibe. The leather and faux leather trenchcoats in particular would have been right at home inThe Matrix. Ultimately, it was the gentler iterations of a Kwaidan uniform that won out, including the aforementioned mannish suiting and the more fluid drawstring outerwear. These clothes had covert elegance to satisfy real-world needs.
1 March 2019
You know what Kwaidan Editions doesn’t believe in? That old maxim, “Never meet your heroes.” And just to really defy it, Léa Dickely and Hung La—the duo who make up this label—went one better: They collaborated with her, theherbeing French multimedia artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. Which is why, at their show, we were standing in the barely lit depths of the Paris nightclub Silencio (designed, incidentally, by another towering figure for this twosome, director David Lynch) listening to the live soundtrack that Gonzalez-Foerster—in fullBlade Runnerreplicant drag, including a towering wig—and her sonic partner in crime, Perez, created: electro-chanson with a spasming, aching heart.Meanwhile, a few feet away across the club, a changing tableau of models wore the label’s Spring 2019 collection, inspired in part by the 1973 Rainer Werner Fassbinder sci-fi movieWorld on a Wire. There was more of Kwaidan Editions’ beautifully rendered tailoring, like a sharply shaped pantsuit in a strong, clear blue; a crisp orange shirt and a matching lean skirt, navigating the line between clinical and chic; and a white tee and black skirt, both cut from a coated polyester. The contrasts on show here were confidently yet un-showily handled; the synthetic fusing with the natural fabrics, the industrial with the soulful.It was all coolly elegant and utterly compelling, yet there was also—and I mean this as a compliment—something jarring and off, unsettling even, a sense that what’s surface and what’s beneath sat in an uneasy dialog. Backstage, before the show, La indicated that was the case, invoking the words that reflect the dilemma which is causing our world to unravel today: “What’s real, and what’s fake?” The gloriously garish 1970s floral La and Dickely used for a compact, viscose knit floor-length sweaterdress, for instance; the pattern looked like something barely remembered, or maybe it’s just imagined. Either way its presence—and impact—was palpable.What’s so good about Kwaidan Editions is its designers’ absolute adherence to doing things their way. They sit quietly in London, avoiding the limelight, studiously turning out their terrific clothes, but this was something of a coming-out for La and Dickely, done how they wanted it. At a time when the fashion industry is being transformed at an unbelievable rate—and with ever greater challenges—it’s a pleasure to see what Kwaidan Editions is hard at work striving to achieve.
They’re ambitious designers in the sense of both thought and execution, but just as impressive, it’s ambition expressed in their own terms.
28 September 2018
Three seasons in—just three, a mere 12 months, a single year, that’s it—and Kwaidan Editions, the London-based label from Léa Dickely and Hung La, has developed a concrete aesthetic and aspiration about what the label should be very nicely indeed. (Good enough, in fact, to make them a contender for this year’s LVMH Prize.) There are the usual terrific coats, cut close through the body then gaining a little volume as they head floorwards, in scarlet wool or leather treated to look python, and equally good—in fact,reallygood—pants, sometimes worn with oversize jackets. In a Paris that has been dominated by trousers cut with a kicky super-flared leg, these were the best, and god knows, the competition has been tough. Elsewhere, the designers’ love of somewhat “off” prints was represented by a woodland scene that was haunting and kitsch in equal measure, derived from a painting they found in London’s Portobello market. And lastly there was more of their careering across all notions of “good” and “bad” taste, with black fake leather shirting, and a trench and a skinny pant in a sick shade—that’s high praise, by the way—of acid green. (Dickely and La delighted, they said, in watching school kids working their way round last year’s Comme show at the Met, pronouncing what they saw as good or bad taste.)The designers’ references and influences varied from: the aforementioned found art (they’d been looking for ages for the right depiction of a forest before they found the artwork); the epic nature of the Pacific Northwest; the strange, sad, twisted, woodsy world of David Lynch’sTwin Peaks; and, La said, what’s real and what’s fake. He was talking about that pleather shirting—as well as a gargantuan faux beaver coat, which gloriously reveled in its synthetic qualities. But of course, these guys are smart in their thinking; they can riff on a defining aspect of our culture today, yet are deft enough in their execution to not let concept overtake the appeal of their extremely fine clothes. They’re still presenting their collections out of their sales showroom, and are resistant to the idea that fashion Darwinism means you need to evolve to a presentation or a fully-fledged show. Kudos to them for choosing to stick to doing things their way, much in the same manner as they’ve refused to be lazily tagged a British label just because they live in the U.K. capital.
They might shun the limelight in favor of just getting on with it, yet it only underscores that in the case of this duo, strength of talent is peerlessly matched by strength of character.
3 March 2018
Earlier this year, Kwaidan Editions appeared with not so much as a tremble or a whisper of anticipation at its arrival. (That this writer knew about it at all was down to the good people ofMatchesFashion.com.) The label, designed by partners in work and life Léa Dickely (she’s French) and Hung La (he’s American), was curious and intriguing. The former because it seemed to come out of nowhere (though “nowhere” is in actual fact London, where the couple is based); the latter because that Fall 2017 collection, mixing a very ’90s brand of minimalist rigor, gloriously nostalgic/kitsch prints, and extravagantly proportioned pieces in workwear cotton drill, was rather terrific.That what they had designed was so good wasn’t the surprise here—Dickely and La’s résumés, including stints at Céline, Balenciaga, and McQueen, explain that easily enough. The real shocker was that in our overly connected age, a label could just spring up one day without a ta-da-like banging of the Internet drums, and be so clearly defined in its aesthetic and ambitions. The name Kwaidan Editions comes fromKwaidan, a spooky Japanese movie from 1965, and that seems about right, for the label’s a little like a spectral entity that comes into view then vanishes into thin air.Six months later, and here it is again. The second appearance of Kwaidan Editions, for Spring 2018, builds on the tensions between the familiar and the new, the masculine and the feminine, and the warmly emotional and the coolly cerebral that were much in evidence in their debut. There are utilitarian techno fabrics, straight out of suburbia florals, and homey checks, all used for pieces drawn with a long, lean line that cleaves to, or cuts loose from, the body, sometimes centered with a metal grommet–trimmed belt. The designers have got a real knack with coats, for sure, but their trousers, all hyper-volume and puddling on the floor, are the stars here.Their Spring offering is also a rare example of being pretty ageless, the only element of what they’ve done that doesn’t come stamped with specificity. There are no trigger trends, nothing designed with the aim of being immediately paraded on social media for all to see. That’s not to say that Dickely and La don’t have a few fashion-with-a-capital-F flourishes up their sleeves. You might not have thought that fetish-y rubberized cotton and Woodstockian hippie tie-dye could coexist, but they do here, and very convincingly at that.
17 November 2017