“The qipao has always been defined by precision and discipline.
I wanted to respect that traditional construction while introducing the language of JENN LEE.
By incorporating the classic qipao three-dart bust technique, the traditional garment is subtly transformed —
retaining its discipline
while taking on a sharper, more contemporary character…”
Wei-Chen Lee, Founder & Creative
Director, JENN LEE
Control is most felt in the moments it threatens to break.
Wei-Chen Lee builds her SS27 collection at the exact point of that threshold: the moment before something gives, the tension held in a body, a fabric, a tradition that has been pulled taut for so long that the line between discipline and rupture becomes the most interesting place to work.
The qipao, with its centuries of encoded meaning, its capacity to simultaneously sculpt and reveal, restrict and expose, is the perfect vessel for that inquiry. Lee’s collection does not resolve the tension; she wears it.
Each piece is grounded in endangered Taiwanese craft techniques that Lee has spent this year documenting in collaboration with a 75-year-old master artisan: hand-crafted frog closures, rice paste sizing, hand-stitched piping, precise steam iron moulding.
These are not decorative references. They are the collection’s entire structural logic, extended into contemporary leather qipaos assembled entirely by hand and onto raw hide surfaces printed with the organic patterns of Taiwanese flora using non-toxic eco-printing. Each imprint is unrepeatable, unpredictable, sitting in direct tension against the exacting lines of the tailoring beneath it.
Flashes of red are immediate and deliberate. A floor-length crimson satin qipao, its front face marked by a vertical column of black hand-crafted closures, carries the collection’s central argument on the surface of the body. They are containment and its opposite simultaneously.
Against the same palette, a sleeveless red maxi with black horizontal clasps hold together fabrics like stitches across the body, pushing the tension into something rawer, more confrontational.
Black enters as the collection’s shadow register: a strapless corset that mirrors the qipao’s structural discipline, worn over laced cargo trousers with crimson detailing at the seam, a braided leather choker at the throat. Control is architectural – but the suggestion of its release is constant.
A pale lavender mini qipao with lace panelling offers the collection’s coolest moment, more contained, more restrained, and somehow equally charged for it. Lee applies the classic three-dart bust technique of traditional qipao construction throughout, the classical form retained and simultaneously sharpened into something distinctly contemporary.
Beauty direction draws on the ancient courtesan, a figure whose softness was always strategic: luminous skin, hair between composed and undone, allure as survival rather than decoration. The soundtrack layers industrial techno and dark jazz against a chanted recitation of the Heart Sutra in Taiwanese, anchoring the atmosphere in something much older than a fashion week calendar.
What Lee is preserving through all of this is not a silhouette but a knowledge system, one that lives in the hands of a 75-year-old artisan and, now, in these garments. Control and its loss, tradition and its reinvention: the season, Lee holds both without flinching.
PHOTOGRAPHY:
Maja Smiejkowska – @msmiejkowska
Prinae – @washingtonp0st
Adam – @adam_pietraszewski
Miriam – @miriam_brailsford
Hebi – @hebikawaaa
Becca – @beasphotoss
Sophie – @sophienoellepixel
