What happens when an indie label veers away from its signature style? This is the question that Zoe Champion and Wei Lin are exploring in Ph5. The Ph5 Dress is a compact knit sleeveless dress with a wave hem in poppy colour. But when they say they have customers buying them over and over again, they start to wonder: “How many wave skirts can you really make?”
Resort is a successful branch out . As Champion said, they are experimenting with “what is real and what is not”. Trompe l’oeil was the big theme throughout the collection, which consisted of a dozen garments that repeated in three colors (Barbie pink and white, black and green, and baby blue and grey).
Last season, they experimented with printing denim silhouettes onto knit pieces. That became the cornerstone of the season, as jeans were printed on stretch-jersey wide-leg trousers, as were lively miniskirts, vests and baggy jackets. Some of the lines and hems are wavy – for example, the “skeleton” on a faux bodice is fully angled – which adds to the surrealism and enhances the Brand Code. There are so many trompe l’oeils that people wonder if they’re trading one eye-catching logo for another. Now, it shows the designer’s willingness to experiment.
