{"id":29330,"date":"2026-07-26T09:38:55","date_gmt":"2026-07-26T08:38:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.agneselect.com\/chiahung_su\/"},"modified":"2026-07-26T20:05:46","modified_gmt":"2026-07-26T19:05:46","slug":"chiahung_su","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.agneselect.com\/en\/fashion\/chiahung_su\/","title":{"rendered":"Chiahung Su: What Can’t Be Hurried"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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EDITOR'S NOTE<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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Every season, Paris Fashion Week works like a tide, washing designers from everywhere up onto the shore for a brief moment of exposure. The established houses spend a million on a show; the new names work showrooms and trade fairs like Trano\u00ef to catch buyers and press. But does a million-euro show with a front row of famous influencers actually move product, or win anyone who stays? Our wardrobes and our inboxes are already full. Most fashion coverage isn’t worth wasting five minutes on \u2014 spend those five minutes on a round of fascia stretching, or a walk around the block. Far better for your well-being.<\/p>

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The designs the press calls fresh and singular: models placed inside transparent eggshells, a Western film set dragged into the middle of a show space. Once the ripple on the surface is gone, what does any of it have to do with us? I have sat through small shows where a group of male models, bare-chested and in their underwear, sprayed water at each other. I thought that routine retired when Tom Ford left Gucci. Seeing it again in 2026 is hard to explain.<\/p>

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In the end, every designer, new or established, is presenting a worldview. How is that different from an account on X that keeps pushing you to follow and subscribe? The difference is that you have to buy the clothes with real money and wear them for a long time. So why this piece and not that one? Why not just wear the logos everyone recognises?<\/p>

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A young designer’s price tag is not young. Sometimes it costs more than a coat from a major house. So you need to know whether the designer has actually put the work into the making and the design, and not only into the presentation, the language around it, and the PR spend. I think that is why people who have been buying clothes for years tend to prefer contemporary Japanese designers: the pricing sits closer to the market, and compared with the handful of household names who stormed Paris in the eighties and nineties, they state their ideas with more restraint. Chiahung Su, from Taiwan, has that same register.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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In the hottest days of late June I went to Chiahung Su’s showroom in Paris. What had drawn me there were the brand images on their Instagram \u2014 well shot, full of force, the colours clean and sombre. The brand describes itself as rooted in Taiwan’s long cultural and historical layers, thinking continuously about cultural preservation, the transmission of craft and questions of identity, while holding a global outlook.<\/p>

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The open constructions at his hems and the deliberately unfinished seams recall some of Elena Dawson’s handling \u2014 the same unruly romanticism. But it is in the choice of cloth that his worldview does its real work. Crisp, sharply cut \u2014 the usual menswear vocabulary has almost nothing to do with these clothes. The fabrics are soft and slack in the hand; even a double-breasted coat shows no hard shell of stiff interlining. Although he trained as an apprentice in a Taiwanese bespoke tailoring shop, what he makes is unmistakably his own, never captured by the tailoring line. Some of the cotton shirting comes off an antique loom in Aichi, Japan. Most of the cloth comes from where his ideas begin \u2014 Taiwan.<\/p>

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His clothes are not only entirely handmade; plant dyeing is the centre of them. And the people who weave for him are Seediq, one of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples.<\/p>

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Working with an indigenous community on weaving is a project that easily acquires a moral halo \u2014 cultural preservation, the transmission of craft \u2014 and there are designers from Africa and South America who have taken the same route, where institutional endorsement comes more readily. But unless the design itself can enter ordinary urban life, none of that is worth overstating.<\/p>

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Identity and inheritance are not a matter of grafting a conspicuous element onto a garment and printing a pattern loud enough to be seen across a room. Before the cloth is ever cut, Chiahung Su has decided that plants from Taiwanese soil, steeped in the island’s own climate, will soak into every thread \u2014 and that they will do it quietly. Seediq dress tends toward vivid red-and-white contrast; on his website all of that colour has been filtered out by black-and-white photography, because the palette of Chiahung Su is the wabi-sabi of his own worldview.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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I asked him why, from the very beginning, dyeing was set as the brand’s principal gene.<\/p>

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“The plain and simple reason is that I couldn’t find the colours I wanted in the commercial fabrics available. You rarely see a colour with enough life in it to move me.”<\/p>

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Plant dyeing, he told me, is a road of experiment with no end to it. Through the two years of lockdown he went back to Taiwan and settled in, working deep into dye research, running experiment after experiment, moving back and forth between London and Taipei. On dyeing, weaving and fibre, he said:<\/p>

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“If a new brand wanted to work in natural dye today and build an archive of fabric like ours, it would take about four to five years \u2014 and it would mean running experiments every single day.”<\/p>

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“Plant dyeing is something that has no end point. The environment changes, the climate changes, so the vegetation and the plant matter we collect metabolise differently. The colour that comes out is slightly different every time.”<\/p>

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Which brought me back to\u00a0Isshoku Issh\u014d<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 one colour, a lifetime \u2014 by the Japanese dyer and weaver Fukumi Shimura, a Living National Treasure who has also won literary prizes for her writing. Shimura learned to weave from her mother at seventeen and began working with plant dyes in the 1950s. Dyeing and weaving, in her account, is a road of both beauty and thorns. The book collects her diaries, and in one passage she describes hanging her own chemically dyed threads out to dry on a tree, beside threads her mother had dyed with plants decades earlier. Her mother’s threads, she found, dissolved into the scenery around them; her own looked stiff, estranged from it. The difference startled her.<\/p>

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Colour, as she understands it, is a natural compound obedient only to natural law \u2014 never something a dyer can devise. You gather the plant at its best moment, simmer it at its best moment, draw the colour out, and repeat. Whether what emerges is complex or plain, it arrives slowly, through the dyer’s accumulated experience rather than her intention.<\/p>

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For Chiahung Su, choosing plant dye over ready-made industrial colour is an attachment to Taiwanese soil. The real colour is not mixed. It is waited for \u2014 handed back by the land and by time.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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A post shared by Chiahung Su (@chiahungsu_)<\/a><\/p><\/div><\/blockquote>\n