SUSAN FANG: Air.Illusion LFW SS2027

​SøEdited Team
Article by: Astrid Kearney 
SøEditor-in-Chief: Chris Saint Sims 
​SøFashion Director: Savannah Barthorpe
​Photography: Rebecca Maynes

​For Spring/Summer 2027, Susan Fang carried her weightless world to the water's edge at the Barbican, spinning a story of love, fantasy and the dreams we build around one another.
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Some designers make clothes. Susan Fang makes atmospheres. Born in China and a graduate of Central Saint Martins, she founded her label in 2017 and has spent the years since refining a language entirely her own: garments that seem to float, drift and breathe, as if gravity had been politely asked to step aside. Moving between London and Shanghai, she has become one of the city's most quietly enchanting voices.

This season, her muse was M. Butterfly, the celebrated tale of a French diplomat and a Chinese opera singer, a love story woven from illusion. Fang, who is designing costumes for a new production at La Monnaie / De Munt in Brussels next spring, was drawn to its tender paradox: that something born of fantasy might still hold real love. She called the collection Air.Illusion.

The setting was a first. Fang staged her show beside the lake at the Barbican, the first fashion show ever held there, with towers of mirrored silver balloons rising around the runway and models crossing the water on stepping stones. Against the Brutalist stone, the effect was otherworldly, softness set against concrete, reflection against weight.

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The show opened in red, a dress alive with fluttering floral appliqués, the colour of seduction and of a bond too strong to break. From there, the collection unfolded through transparency and play. Blue-and-white florals and porcelain-inspired details nodded to Chinese ceramics, while layers of sheer fabric shifted between revealing and concealing. A qipao fell in long beaded strands, broken porcelain was hand-painted into new life, and petal-like earrings were made in collaboration with a Beijing jade master.

Tradition met the future with ease. Pieces made on a 3D printer sat beside embroidery and handwork, never replacing it, and a new Crocs collaboration, Echo Blume, bloomed with metallic flowers grown from Fang's signature fractal system. It was a gentle reminder that technology, in thoughtful hands, can still make something wondrous.

Beauty

The skin was fresh and dewy, with the soft, untouched glow of a child's face after a morning spent outdoors. Nothing sat heavily; the complexion simply seemed to breathe. On the lips, the faintest strawberry kiss, a whisper of natural rosiness, as though colour had risen there on its own after an afternoon of play. It was innocence rendered in the lightest of touches, the kind of beauty you notice only when you look twice.

The hair held a quiet fragility. Delicate plaits wound across the front and sides of the head, woven with care yet left gently undone, with small strands escaping here and there as if a child had braided them mid-game and run off to play. Elsewhere, the crown became a place of treasure: fragments of blue-and-white crockery set into the hair like pieces of a broken dream, carrying the collection's porcelain story from the clothes to the head. It was romantic and a little wistful, beauty that felt found rather than made, and all the more precious for its imperfections.

CREDITS 

PR: @purplepr
Styling: @victoiresimonney
Makeup Designer: @erngrn
Hair Lead: @annacofone
@authenticconcept
Casting: @emileastrom