UNROW

Although light does not actually enter the eye at the moment of rubbing it, people can still see light, which is a puzzling phenomenon called “Phosphënës” in Greek. The UNROW 21 A/W takes it as its theme and likens the growth of plants to “phosphene”, thereby gaining insight into human’s musings on color and life.
Chapter one Growth

Unlike humans who use the retina to receive light, plants often use stems and leaves to distinguish changes in brightness, who can even sense the direction and length of the light. Every seed buried deep in the soil is a black “eye”, which subverts human’s definition of “seeing”.

Chapter two Squeeze

The environment that the soil provides shade to plants also becomes a barrier that lives cannot leave. The overlapping rhizomes grow densely in it. There is no power that takes deeper roots than the desire of “craving” in a field full of pressure and suffocation.
They perceive the sun and the rain on the other side of the soil, just as the saints vaguely hear the distant scriptures on the way to seek truth.

Chapter three Reverberation

With the mission of blooming, the springing-up lives are squeezed in lots of white space. After a dense and dull reverberation, the last tightly bound soil loosens on the boundary. The newborn seedlings reach out to the world in the dawn’s clear and bright light. Tears come to eyes of the warm sun, of which the first shed in the morning embraces green buds that have undergone polishing. The transparent morning dew projects the lushness of the entire forest and the beauty of life, that is birth, old age, sickness, and death, and autumn fruits and spring blossoms. Flexible “paranoia”, nascent “sprouting”, and blooming “mission”. Characters and plants meet in overlapping light and shadow, realizing the blending of destiny. At the outbreak of the raging novel coronavirus pandemic, all mankind has experienced unprecedented spiritual refreshing. The already flattened world has put up yellow tapes of quarantines. We have to learn to replace “what you see” with “what you feel” and “expression” with “practice” in our own closed dark containers. Like plants, we can be resurrected in the unknown and squeezed world with brightness in our heart.
This series collaborate in vision with SHAN HUANG, an artist living in France. The installation art with cult temperament and the fashion with the atmosphere of the earth merge into one, unfolding a moving scene of intertwined darkness and light. The designer Zhou Hao selects widespread reconstituted fabrics close to the rough soil texture and matches them with the thin lace like the seedlings. The similar contrast is also reflected in the wrapped silhouette and the open partial details. It aims to use fashion as the carrier to show the enthusiasm and paranoia that dreamers still hold in an era of disorder. UNROW uses simple and direct visual language and restless romantic feelings to perceive the new world at the moment of rubbing the eyes in the darkness and blank space.