I'm Shao Yang, and today's programming is Underworld Royale, Part 2. This is no sequel, it is the next chapter, as we are still only scratching the style surface of underworld royalty. Part 1 stayed outside, in the violence and the atmosphere. This time we are going into the characters who live inside the '90s Triad films.
Last season brought the fashion to the front row, a close-up of SHAO x '90s Hong Kong Golden Age Cinema. This season brings the flip side of that fashion story and puts you even closer. The film is rolling, you are in the scene. In September, we brought this story to Chinese Tuxedo in New York City's Chinatown. It reminded me of the Bensonhurst I grew up in, where Chinatown and Little Italy share the same streets, lined with dim sum parlors and red-checkered tablecloths. Now, the story comes to Shanghai. Stage and screen meet here, and you're in this show.
As the collection moves amongst you, you are sitting with everything these characters carry once the action stops, their loneliness, their betrayal, their love, grief, death, sadness, loss, and the forlorn silence sitting underneath all of it. The body count is the easiest thing to remember about these films and the smallest part of them. When the action ends, their lives continue. These mellow-dramatic hours are where these melodrama stage players live.
This is a continuance of the same world, and as always, leather meets denim and wool. These are the same people, and this time we architecturally draped all three into a softer, more fluid silhouette that is reminiscent of the emotions of the characters. Leather that used to armor a man falls open across his back, denim drifts instead of holding its line, and wool pools where it once stood at attention. The structure has not left, it has gone underneath, because softness here is not the absence of danger, it is the danger sitting down with nowhere left to be.
My brand and I are said to live somewhere between the Eastern World I imagined as a kid, and the NYC I grew up in. Underworld Royale, Part 1: Darkness Under Neon Lights debuted in Shanghai, the world I started in. For Part 2, Softness in the Shadows, all roads first led back to NYC, my forever home. Now, the story returns to Shanghai. This stage holds the characters with nowhere left to hide. Instead of exploiting them, we are all stepping inside the scene with them.
Creative Director & Designer: @shaoy
Show Director: @xiao_weixiao
Stylist: @alvinyu613
Art Director: @joejojorain
Shanghai PR: @diacommunications
New York PR: @repnyc
Casting Director: babygiants
Organizer: @shanghai_fashionweek
Venue: Hall Blue, Taiping Lake, Shanghai Xintiandi
Music: @prodblossom
Hair: @lorealpro
Makeup: @maccosmetics
Nails: @pattieyankee @pattieyankeeproducts
First Look: @wanjin1996 & Cheng (AFWORKS)
Photography: The Shoot
