Huishan Zhang Spring 2018 Ready-To-Wear....Fashionweekly...On Fow24news.com

For whom is Huishan Zhang designing? That’s not a rhetorical question. One of the difficulties of engaging with Zhang’s collections is that it’s hard to picture the woman he sees in his clothes. You catch certain qualities—she’s classically feminine in the way she dresses, a little quirky, extremely fond of embellishment—but not a lifestyle or a point of view.......
Zhang, as a designer, is completely nonpsychological. That’s why his collections tend to fall flat, despite all their flair. This season, for instance, it was really hard to envision the person who was looking for a pearl-embroidered, ruffle-trimmed red metallic knit hoodie, a scallop-detailed trenchcoat, and a flounced floral brocade shift with peekaboo openings. The pieces were consistent in their cheer and their decorated-ness, but they didn’t string together to tell a coherent, meaningful story.

According to Zhang, the story he wanted to tell was about the 1960s—to take the mod mood and give it a contemporary spin. His instincts about how to extrapolate that concept were often good ones: There was some nice work with the plastic paillettes, and Zhang was onto something with his bright, maximal graphics (though the look lost force as it was prettified). And the free-spirited, on-the-go attitude of the mod woman does probably translate, today, into the sporty elements that were sprinkled lightly through the collection. But then Zhang loses you again by, say, putting a whole bunch of feathers on a pair of shorts. Who is this woman? It’s hard to believe she’s been glimpsed anywhere other than on Instagram, the place reality-in-fashion goes to die.