TIFARET’s PAI TOU: ss26 - an intersection between memory and infrastructure

SøEdited Team
SøEditor-in-Chief: Chris Saint Sims 
​SøFashion Director: Savannah Barthorpe​​​​

TIFARET’s PAI TOU reads as an intersection between memory and infrastructure. The collection looks back to 1990s Shanghai, a city in trade’s acceleration, where the designer’s mother worked among cargo, tariffs, and foreign goods. The child who watched the port now builds garments that recall its systems — movement, exchange, risk.

The work connects Shanghai and London, two cities defined by docks and departure. Its language is utilitarian: cargo shapes, sailor cuts, Victorian remnants reworked with the precision of Chinese flat-pattern tailoring. Florals from tropical prints collide with industrial silhouettes — elegance imposed on grit.

Historical subtexts surface without sentiment. Pyjama forms reference the uniforms of Shanghai’s sex workers; silk linings trace the indulgence of opium dens. Each garment holds this duality — structure and surrender, discipline and decay.

The construction favours air over fit. Space between cloth and body becomes a zone of translation, where the tension of two cultures is measured in folds, hems, and restraint. Nothing here pleads nostalgia.
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PAI TOU studies what remains when systems collapse and reform — trade into desire, labour into style, memory into surface. It’s not a narrative, but a diagram: ports, bodies, routes, fabric.

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