RUOHAN SS27 - PARIS FASHION WEEK

[IN BECOMING] Everything begins before meaning. A line crosses an empty space. Another descends beside it. One falls away, another turns towards it. Alone, they say almost nothing. Together, something begins to take form. 横, 竖, 撇, 捺. Four gestures. Horizontal, vertical, left-falling, right-falling. Before the character, there is only movement; before language, a trace left in space. From so little, an entire world of meaning can be made. This season began with this thought: how does one thing become another without ceasing to be itself? In Chinese writing, strokes gather into components. A component moves, changes position, enters into a new relationship. What it remains is familiar, yet what it means is no longer quite the same. Perhaps clothing begins in the same place. We began with a grid. Lines crossed, disappeared, and left openings behind. Emptiness became as important as what remained. A line became a cut. A cut became an opening. An opening met the body and found another form. What seemed empty became structure; what seemed fixed began to move. Then we returned to the simplest pieces from which a garment is made: a front, a back, a skirt, a sleeve. We treated them as radicals of another language. They were divided along their darts, shifted, extended and reunited. Nothing needed to become entirely new. Sometimes it was enough for something familiar to find another place. For a form does not exist by itself. It exists beside another form, at a certain distance, at a certain moment. Change the position and the relationship changes. Change the relationship and another whole appears. The same thought leaves the body and enters the space. Derived from the radical patterns of the garments, forms are enlarged, translated into aluminium and suspended in relation to one another. What once shaped the body begins to shape the space around it. The element remains. The relationship changes. Material, too, is caught in a state of becoming. A specially developed linen brings the original grid into its construction: eight yarns cross four directions and two surfaces, woven into one. The grid is no longer drawn upon the fabric. It becomes the fabric. Elsewhere, ramie voile shifts between transparency and structure, lightness and stiffness. Strokes. Radicals. Positions. Perhaps each chapter is only the same gesture, seen at another moment. Before it becomes, it is already becoming. 17 rue Commines 75003 Paris - 30th of September 2026 14.00