A wine-stained dress, a cigarette-burnt puffer and broken heels on the catwalk would be a nightmare scenario for most designers. But for his inaugural haute couture show in Paris this past January, London-based Robert Wun relished the idea of embracing imperfection. ‘I thought, “What if I examine the very thing that I’m afraid of? How do I take a well-made, silk- chiffon, embroidered garment and flip it on its head?”’ says the 31-year-old. The SS23 show earned him industry-wide praise and A-list fans including Lizzo, Tessa Thompson and Florence Pugh. Those in the know, meanwhile, have been following his futuristic designs and otherworldly craftsmanship since he launched his eponymous ready-to-wear line in 2014.
A long-time horror fan (Stephen King’s clown thriller It was on the mood board), fear, escapism, and the thought of creating something ‘a little f*cked up’ were a driving force behind his debut couture line. Wun later reveals his show-stopping wine-splattered dress nearly didn't see the light of day. ‘We tested formulas for two weeks. Less than one week before the show, I overdyed it,’ he shares. ‘I stayed up re-dyeing the new dress and Christian, a member of my team, sewed a new one. My team are incredible, I couldn’t do any of it without them.’
Surprisingly, fashion was not his first calling. Wun was born and raised in Hong Kong, and his family thought he’d become a biologist. But while waiting for his mother in a hair salon as a teen, he stumbled across an Alexander McQueen menswear campaign in a magazine; it stopped him in his tracks. After encouragement from his parents, he moved to live with his grandparents in the UK and studied at the London College of Fashion.
It was an ode to his grandmother in Wun’s AW21 show that solidified his one-to-watch status. The pièce de résistance – known as ‘the purple look’ – replicated a look Robert made for his grandmother for his sister’s wedding in 2019. A picture of it on Wun’s social media caused a sensation – and transformed his business. ‘I posted it on Instagram at 3pm and my phone started buzzing non-stop. My grandmother’s photo was next to me, and I began crying,’ he says, and his eyes well up at the memory. ‘It was the moment that changed everything; it all feels like a dream come true.’
Wun’s journey to haute couture is a continuation of that dream. Winning the prestigious Andam fashion award in 2022 put him in contact with Chanel’s president of global fashion Bruno Pavlovsky, who became Wun’s mentor. ‘The idea of haute couture never occurred to me; Bruno was the first person to mention it,’ says Wun. After a unanimous vote from the Fédéra- tion de la Haute Couture et de la Mode to accept Wun onto the tightly controlled couture-week schedule, his show was officially go. ‘I was very insecure all the way throughout the process – even the night after the show,’ he says. But, even so, he intends to release another couture collection this summer. It will no doubt be as enthusiastically received as the first, which revealed the beauty in what’s broken.
Kendall Jenner's Style File
