Stepping into Hengdi Wang’s SS26 show felt more like entering a celestial archive of myth and memory, in a futuristic world.
EXOGENESIS, as the designer frames it, is a meditation on the origins of life—both terrestrial and otherwise—where Eastern mythology collides with post-human forms, digital craftsmanship, and 3D-printed futurism.
The collection reads as a dossier of imagined exoplanets: primordial beasts of Shan Hai Jing are reborn as hyper-organic, biomorphic archetypes, while Kunlun becomes a crashed generational starship, echoing lost voyages across interstellar space. The pieces themselves straddle fragility and resilience, with segmented armor, exoskeletal chitin, and iridescent scales realized in 3D-printed textiles and metallic filaments. It’s couture as codex, a fusion of sacred geometry, mechanical oracle scripts, and nebula imagery that makes garments pulse with both cultural memory and digital life.
Traditional craftsmanship is present, but never sentimental. Jacquard and embroidery are reimagined as vessels of information, intertwining with algorithmic patterns to create a language that feels simultaneously ancient and extraterrestrial. The glowing bio-luminescent filaments that trace some of the silhouettes give the impression of clothing as living organisms—mutant yet elegant, alien yet deeply human.
The runway itself became a stage for contemplation: models moved like sentinels of a forgotten cosmic history, their bodies framed by spiraling exoskeletons and laser-etched symbols that felt more like encrypted messages than fashion. There’s a radical fluidity here too—genderless, multidimensional, a language of form that refuses the human body’s conventional limitations.
Hengdi Wang’s vision is uncompromisingly ambitious. It is haute couture as philosophy, as anthropology, as science fiction. With EXOGENESIS, Wang doesn’t just clothe the body—he encodes it, embedding it in a continuum between myth and post-human futurism. By the end of the show, the line between what is organic, what is digital, and what is imagined collapses entirely, leaving a lingering sense that fashion might just be the next vessel for humanity’s collective memory.
EXOGENESIS is a cosmic elegy and a manifesto all at once—a reminder that couture, at its most daring, is not just about beauty, but about imagining entirely new modes of existence.
Images: @MARCUSHARTELT / Header: @B.lla
