Quirky name, covetable designs – fashion is going to be hearing a lot about Kwaidan Editions
- She freelanced for Alexander McQueen, he learned his trade at Balenciaga and Céline.
- When Léa Dickely and Hung La launched their label, they said ‘a lot without much’, and fashion world took note
Since launching in 2016, London-based fashion label Kwaidan Editions has been pushing boundaries with its stand-out designs. Its razor-sharp tailoring, slinky knitwear, and disturbingly attractive plasticised coats have been scooped up by retailers such as 10 Corso Como, Dover Street Market and Joyce, with little publicity.
Kwaidan Editions was among the finalists for this year’s LVMH Prize for young fashion designers, and the label is about to show a capsule collection with online retailer Ssense.
Its fourth collection, for spring 2019, explores further the label’s love for the cinematic – specifically, the virtual reality world of West German Rainer Werner Fassbender’s 1973 sci-fi film World on a Wire, which can be enjoyed as a commentary on today’s world or simply for the clash between the languid proportions of a ribbed knit dress and sterile blue overalls.
It’s not hard to see why strangeness resonates with the label, which is designed by Léa Dickely and Hung La. “Kwaidan” means strange stories, and is a nod to Kwaidan, a 1965 Japanese horror film by Masaki Kobayashi. It’s a word that could also be applied to their meeting in the first year of their studies at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts.
Vietnamese-American La, 39, grew up in the US state of Maryland and studied computer engineering. As a teenager, he developed a fascination with fashion, and at 21, left engineering behind and enrolled at Istituto Marangoni and the Parsons School of Design in New York, before heading to Antwerp.
