DIDU has presented Lost in Transition for Autumn/Winter 2022 with a collection film and live presentation during Paris Fashion Week. DIDU is a Shanghai-based womenswear brand by designer and Royal Academy Antwerp alumni Di Du founded in 2019 and showcasing jointly at both Paris and Shanghai Fashion Weeks
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Collections become a series of visual poems transporting the audience away from reality, every shape, detail, fabric and fastening become words and symbols, ordered and layered to tell stories which go beyond fantasy to express Di Du’s deepest contemplations and emotions.
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Lost in Transition began with the designer’s internal conversations, focussing on the personal journey we must all travel to reconcile different facades and aspects of ourselves, to arrive at a place of acceptance and self-mastery. The DIDU woman this season is found not in the one, but the many, seemingly incompatible characters, personas, personalities and egos within us all, and how one-by-one they take the lead as we move throughout the world.
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Di Du’s work challenges the dichotomy of conservatism and liberalism, how this informs our experience as we move about our world, and how this balance is expressed differently in differences spaces. A radical approach to acceptance and expression looks beyond cultural boundaries, expanding through euphoric and psychedelic dimensions to advocate for conscious individuality.
Lost in Transition is a love letter to ourselves, unconditional and embracing of the roles we play and how this multiplicity is beautifully reconciled in each of us in the ecstasy of self-acceptance.
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DIDU represents female futurism, a third space liberated from expectation and deeply connected to the power and beauty of the body. To the external world, clothing is our outermost layer, a skin atop our skin. This relationship between the garment and the body is central to Di Du’s philosophy of cutting away the unnecessary to bravely expose the body – powerful, sensual, authentic and unashamed. Slashed, flashed, frayed, and distorted, her work hangs between tension and release proposing a fluid and dynamic new elegance.
This season, dramatic and contrasting colour, texture and textiles cooperate and compete, embodying the pressure and relief of the protagonist’s journey inwards. Sensitive balancing of these aspects of design creates an innate energy and momentum within each piece, right at the threshold of tension and harmony. Fluid and dynamic, it is at once familiar to what has come before, but fresh and forward-looking; comforting but confronting; soft but strong; feminine but with force; confident, seductive, neoteric: sublime.
