The Oscar Ouyang SS27 collection, shown on Friday at Rochelle School in London and presented in collaboration with Pull&Bear, is called Cygnet: not the ugly duckling, not the swan, but the creature caught between the two. That is, deliberately, the hardest one to define.
Fashion’s obsession with the in-between is well-worn territory, but Ouyang makes something genuinely specific of it. The cygnet, he explains, names a moment in coming of age that resists resolution. ‘It’s not a transformation, but it’s somewhere that’s in between,’ he says. ‘I find the word cygnet quite interesting because you have the ugly duckling, you have the swan, and you have the cygnet, which makes it a bit hard to define what kind of stage you are at.’ The collection does not try to resolve that ambiguity so much as dress for it.
The Oscar Ouyang SS27 Collection and Its Collaboration With Pull&Bear
The show is part of Pull&Bear’s Canvas for Creativity project with BFC NEWGEN, and, according to i-D, it marks Ouyang’s third London Fashion Week collection. The project was designed to bring Ouyang’s world to a broader audience without dissolving what gives it its particular texture. Throughout, the boundary between Ouyang’s own pieces and the Pull&Bear garments was, by design, not immediately clear: familiar silhouettes were reworked through detachable details, customisable hardware, hidden pockets and bursts of confetti. Festival boots arrived in a warm, worn suede that recalled pairs photographed in Glastonbury street style from years past.
‘We worked with natural materials and familiar garments, softening, twisting and reimagining them, as if they were suspended between dressing to go out and surrendering to the moment,’ Ouyang says. ‘It’s chic with a little chaos: a burst of confetti just before the night comes to an end.’ Materiality mattered to him throughout the process. ‘I’m quite persistent,’ he adds. ‘I [said] we need to use everything that is a hundred per cent actual material.’
The collection is now available to shop, as Pause Magazine notes, via the Pull&Bear website, a relatively unusual move for a NEWGEN collaboration, and one that signals the project’s intent to reach beyond the usual circuit of industry insiders and press.
Subculture, Silverware and Sofia Coppola
The references Ouyang cites for Cygnet form a coherent constellation. The Virgin Suicides looms large, less for its darker currents than for its quality of unresolved longing. ‘Sofia’s visual references keep on getting referenced in fashion, but when it’s a classic, it’s something we should just keep reinterpreting, especially when it’s the brighter side of a classic,’ Ouyang says. ‘It’s a film that poses so many questions, and I think sometimes [they are] questions that do not have answers; that’s why people are so obsessed with it.’ The collection also reaches toward the vernacular of prom and homecoming: satin, silver embellishments and pieces that read as borrowed from a grandparent’s wardrobe, layered under a best-fit exterior. Antique silverware gathered along the way informed the jewellery direction. ‘You’re dressing yourself to make this statement, because it’s a social language,’ Ouyang says.
Rochelle School was chosen as the venue because it was formerly a school for boys and girls, extending a narrative thread from his debut show, in which young people threw a last party at their parents’ house. This season, he says, brings them back to school: a prom, or a homecoming. The set and setting are part of how Ouyang builds meaning, not decoration applied after the fact.
Underlying all of it is a thinking about subculture that refuses the usual definitions. For Ouyang, subculture does not require a strict code or a fixed aesthetic. ‘Subculture just equals being niche,’ he says. ‘Maybe a more niche group of friends, their own interpretation of culture and doing something that’s culturally related.’ The Oscar Ouyang SS27 collection was made through exactly that process: months of gallery openings, gigs, late-night conversations, friends pulled in to weigh in on taste. ‘You go to all these kinds of music events, gigs and then you have a drink and then you talk shit together,’ he says. The result is a collection that feels worn-in before it has even been worn, which is, of course, precisely the point.
