LÙCHEN approaches couture not as ornament, but as inquiry. For the season, the house turns inward, using construction as a way to ask how garments behave, how they collapse, resist, stretch, or yield to the body and how those reactions can generate an emotional language of movement. Here, form is only the beginning; meaning emerges through motion, pressure, and time.
Material sits at the center of this exploration, functioning simultaneously as method and message. Feathers, a recurring visual language in LÙCHEN’s universe return with renewed intention. This time, they are simulated rather than natural, cut meticulously from reclaimed sources: leftover fabric fragments, deadstock offcuts, regenerated plastics. Assembled piece by piece, they form a pixelated feather surface, an artificial plumage built through accumulation, repair, and repetition. The result feels both delicate and deliberate, a surface that holds memory rather than illusion.
Inside the LÙCHEN atelier, these materials are not incidental. The studio maintains a growing archive of recycled remnants drawn from previous collections and renewed sources. Each fragment is cut into distinct forms, carrying its own origin and lifecycle. When joined together, they create a larger surface, almost like a time-net where layers quietly document what came before. Couture, here, becomes an act of preservation as much as creation.
This constructed feather language is set against the presence of real feathers, which appear as a point of contrast rather than dominance. Natural feathers are fleeting, vivid yet fragile, a reminder of impermanence and the passage of time. The tension between the real and the simulated, the organic and the engineered, runs through the collection as a central question rather than a resolved statement.
Beyond feathers, LÙCHEN expands its material vocabulary through other reclaimed and unconventional elements. One hundred percent recycled acrylic appears alongside components derived from landfill waste, including eggshells and mussel shells. Objects that feel slightly displaced by time — glass marbles, for instance, surface as quiet disruptions. Used sparingly, they become structural textures or subtle traces, testing how far material can be pushed without sacrificing precision.
The silhouettes themselves are shaped by a continuous negotiation with gravity. Rigid, suspended volumes hold the body in moments of stillness, creating pause and restraint. Elsewhere, weight-driven drapery releases the form into flow, allowing garments to respond instinctively to movement. This oscillation between control and surrender, suspension and collapse establishes the collection’s core rhythm.
In this season’s work, LÙCHEN positions couture as a site of reflection rather than spectacle. Each piece records behavior: of materials, of bodies, of time itself. The garments do not simply dress the wearer, they move with them, remember with them, and quietly ask what it means to construct beauty from what remains.
