Wooyoungmi’s SS26 men’s show was a deliriously crisp love letter to heat – yes, heat – and how one might swan through it whilst keeping their elegance intact. Unfurling at Paris’s Maison de la Chimie, Madame Woo was thinking about Seoul’s sweltering summer milieu, the haze and the lightness essential to surviving soaring temperatures amid the metropolis. And in the apt, city scorch of Paris on the day, the designer spun a fever dream of tailoring that flirted with formality, then promptly stripped it bare.
Tailcoats in super-light silk viscose were sliced to shrunken proportions, making models look like Edwardian dandies lost on their way to the Han River. Razor-edged hourglass suiting in mohair read sharp to the eye but swayed like chiffon in motion. Swimwear as city gear – a surprise category – morphed into gentleman’s stripes and clung like second skin under sheer rayon shorts and picnic-ready knitwear. Even the collars got a dopamine hit – encrusted and detachable like glinting talismans for the sun-soaked flâneur.
There were wisps of pyjama dressing, boyish Mary-Janes reborn with reptilian flair and raffia bags that unfold into picnic blankets, because why not? It was languid, louche and seductively precise – an ode to ventilation and va-va-voom. In a city where summer feels something like a euphoric high, Wooyoungmi SS26 offered clothes for dreaming – only lighter, finer and impossibly cooler.
Photography by Christina Fragkou.
