Anna Quan Resort 2016 – that French cuff shirt and other classics reimagined

What makes a shirt a shirt, or a jacket a jacket? Thus yours truly found her mind wondering, while shuffling through the runway images I’d taken at Anna Quan’s showing at this year’s Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia. The collection was characterised by its ritual deconstruction of traditional clothing archetypes. Her classic french cuff shirt from resort 2015 (which had already garnered viral popularity) was redesigned in a backless incarnation; a deceivingly simple halter dress was tailored as though it were a jacket, and with side seams ingeniously eliminated to highlight the cord ribbon and o-ring closure, the latter being an unifying element of the collection.

The result was something that is in that tantalising entr’acte of being at once comfortingly familiar but unsettlingly novel. This, far from being a perversion of clothes making traditions, is perhaps the most transparent demonstration of a designer’s mastery of tailoring methods.

‘For me, it’s about utilising the traditional way of constructing something to build a story,’ designer, Anna Hoang commented, in her characteristically erudite manner (she is, after all, a member of our legal fraternity). ‘The hardest thing is having a conceptual basis and conceptual integrity – the guiding light for a collection.’

More: Anna Quan on web and Instagram.

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