Rui Zhou is fresh off winning the LVMH Special Prize in Paris—so fresh that when we spoke she was mid-way through quarantine at a hotel in Shanghai. Zhou is an attentive and emotional designer and the experience of isolation is sure to inform her upcoming work. For spring 2022, photographed in Paris while she was there for the prize, Zhou ruminated on the idea of home. She pulled motifs from her own household—pointed cut-outs were inspired by her grandfather’s woodworking—but placed them in a context that she wants to read as “not Paris, not China, and not the United States.”
Instead, her models live in a rich, liminal space where strange things happen: Couches are in bathrooms and chairs are on the ceiling. That sense of unexpectedness colors her work. In a season of body-baring garments, Zhou’s are surprising for their ability to reveal everything while giving away nothing. She thinks of the tiny strands of beads that hold her popular catsuits and leotards together not as sexy strappy little fasteners, but as a way to reflect the ties that bind us; a row of pearls holding together a Rui top signify the meeting point of juxtaposing ideas.
This kind of contradiction is another recurring theme in her work. “I use a soft language to pronounce the hard shapes,” she says of her design ethos. Here, she continued to use gentle curves and bias cutting, adding weightier fabrics and new techniques, like a jacquard silk with a butterfly-orchid pattern and a diamond crochet process used on tops, skirts, and dresses. Separates like shirts, trousers, and tunics have worked their way into the collection as well; they look like clothes for those of us not as daring as the ideal Rui muse.
Zhou’s sister works for the government in China and wears a uniform every day, but she could wear a Rui top underneath if she wanted, the designer explained—just a little secret for her to know. That intimacy between wearer and garment is essential to her process. With the funding and mentorship of LVMH it will be interesting to see how Zhou builds and grows her brand without losing its sensuous spirit.
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