Louis Shengtao Chen was crowned the winner of the 2024 edition of the Vogue China Fashion Fund last October. Since, he’s taken a step back to, as they say, get all his ducks in a row. He stepped away from the runway for spring 2025, and put together a lookbook (and a very good collection at that). He skipped the fall 2025 season altogether, and now he’s back to launch his first-ever pre-collection, a two-punch effort to expand his commercial footprint and gear up for the spring 2026 season and his return to the runway.
Chen said that this collection is a sort of “part one” to the main event coming in the fall. If that’s the case, he put together a rather appetizing amuse-bouche: semi-sheer tailored coats in powdery pastel colors, cutesy floral separates with funky but cool askew seams and cascading ruffles, and a couple of fabulous multi-layered pencil skirts and slips with full godets that make them as flattering as they are weird. Ditto a couple of balloon-hemmed skirts and trousers, its top layers sheer and the under ones cut in white for a vintage-y x-ray look. In some, he’s even encapsulated strings of pearls within.
Chen cuts a mean dress; the clear evidence seen in prim and proper embroidered tea-length ball gowns and skirts or sinuously cut sheaths. The novelty this season is tailoring, a category Chen has somewhat explored in the past but never wholly committed to. Here he’s made elongated waistcoats, some proper office trousers, and a great single-button blazer.
Chen has been a particularly interesting designer to follow since his debut. His exuberant style and often explosive, mind-boggling silhouettes have made him a darling of the Shanghai Fashion Week scene, but it often left his followers wondering which parts of his world they’d actually be able to buy into. This past year has clearly afforded him a newfound maturity—he’s kept his delightfully bizarro signature style but found ways of making it commercially viable. These are cool, fun clothes. Should he make the jump to Paris during the upcoming ready-to-wear season, as he’s previously hinted, he should make sure to continue down this path.
