Austin Wang and Yansong Liu of Ao Yes started the year auspiciously with a best-selling Zara collaboration available exclusively in mainland China. As niche and specific as their design proposition is—they cut a memorable and sharp silhouette, but not everyone can carry off a Mao jacket—the partnership has fanned their already fiery global ambitions. This was only the pair’s third runway show but it was their most complete, and one of the most well-rounded propositions of the week.
Wang and Liu continued their examination of China’s past by utilizing images from the Republic of China as a starting point. They looked at photos of young people wearing school uniforms—“we wanted to express young, school love,” said Liu—which they complemented with images of iconic, often torrid love affairs. There was a screen capture of Marina Abramovic’s performance “The Artist is Present,” a snap of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke in the 1997 movie Gattaca, and a range of stills from Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 romance In the Mood for Love. (In Chinese, In the Mood for Love is written 花樣年華, which translates literally to “flowery years,” in reference to one’s coming of age and is understood as “the best years of one’s youth.”)
“There’s something they can’t say [about] their emotions,” Liu offered, remarking that the throughline in the relationships depitcted in these images is the unspoken. Wang and Liu are no strangers to romance, but the headline from this particular collection is that they expanded on the notion without rehashing their past work. Last season they ruminated on unrequited love with a collection that ranged from delicately flirty to timid and coy, but the characters in this show had an enviable sense of self often absent in stories rooted in youth.
In Gattaca, Thurman wears a cross-collared blouse reminiscent of a classic Chinese style, which Liu and Wang combined with Maggie Cheung’s In the Mood for Love qipaos to create a truly fantastic little sheath with padded shoulders and hips. What makes Ao Yes a standout is the exacting precision with which Liu, a graduate of Bunka Fashion College, cuts the clothes. There is a rigor to his tailoring that seeps into the rest of the collection—consider the sharpness of a memorable pair of men’s shorts that present as a skirt until they reveal pleated inner legs, or even the considerate looseness of an ultrasuede flared coat or a felted circle skirt.
Restraint was another word Wang and Liu used to describe their idea of the unspoken. Sometimes we don’t have the right words to say the things we feel. Other times, particularly as we grow older, we do have the words but think it wiser to keep them to ourselves. Young love is a hurricane of too-muchness. This Ao Yes collection was refreshingly just enough.
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