Hong Kong young fashion designers named at YDC as VIP judge Rok Hwang urges a customer, not a bubble

He would not hurry them onto an international circuit. Fashion, as he describes it, is a cycle of buyer, customer and company. Sell-through has to be understood before anyone is asked to trust the model.

Spending in Asia, in his view, is livelier than in London or Paris. “Once they find the right customer, they can localise the business and scale it.” A first collection does not have to plan a global invasion.

What the jury and the public actually bought

The prizes, once they came, answered him only in part.

Tsui’s The Tide was drawn from Kuang Chao, the 1976 Cantopop theme song for TVB’s drama of the same name, sung by Susanna Kwan. The four looks follow a woman’s life.

He put it more plainly. “I once heard a Cantonese oldie,” he said. “And it’s about a woman and her ups and downs. I took that as the idea.”

He thought the jury had gone for the making. “The handwork is heavy,” he said, “but it stays clean.”

The grind was the stitching. “That was the hardest part. Every day, 18 to 20 hours, for a whole month.”

This was his first collection. “My first in my life.” A school friend had once said they wanted to make clothes. That was what pulled him in. He is not rushing a house.

Kenneth’s NOSTALGIA takes its title from Tarkovsky. The booth had been wound in cloth, rotting lace and a ruined bride. The white wedding idea, he said, was the third or fourth he tried. It came from family albums.

As a child he kept seeing the wedding photographs at home and decided that was when a woman looked most beautiful, so he made it again. Phones went up along the runway. That was what he had wanted.

He thinks the two prizes went to the vision, a large and rather dramatic world, more than to the clothes alone. The manufacturer required by the rules was his own brand. Next, a holiday, then work. 

Jenny’s public win was The Old Si-Fut and New Chai. Old Si-fut and new chai are office names, the old hand and the junior. She had been too nervous to watch the crowd.

The suit, she said, held a small revolt in the cut of the trousers. She would not say it with her mouth. The clothes say it, and she still has to go to work. Why the vote? The film behind the clothes was recognisable.

She wants a brand later. For now she would rather spend a few years under other designers.

The night gave them a public acknowledgment at the start of a career, and a lift to keep going. Hwang, who has run ROKH for eight years and also cuts for GU, is the kind of working designer the contest puts in front of them.

“In high fashion,” he said, “you think about one person you love. For the mass market you have to learn how many people will actually put the thing on, and how they live.”

That, for him, is the border each designer has to draw.

“They have to make their own set of rules for the life, whether this makes it real or not,” he said. “If they have the purpose, and the end goal of what they want to be, then that is their business. They need to set where they want to go.”