Inspired by balloons and charged with the static of trailblazing technology PH5’s founder Wei Lin and designer Mijia Zhang float into Fashion Week with confidence.
After making their debut last year at the Swiss Institute in Tribeca, PH5 has officially sweetened the bridge between science and art by fusing the technicality of their knitwear with the art that inspires Mijia Zhang. In keeping with tradition, PH5 presented their FW17 collection at another gallery, specifically the Bortolami Gallery in Chelsea. It’s a purposeful move: Zhang’s response to art materializes in clothing and where better to showcase it than in the very place people experience the strongest reactions to art?
Light shimmers on the fabric as the models shift their weight. Colors burst then glide across your line of vision. White balloons swell in the cool space. It’s a silent nod to artist Martin Creed’s work, No. 227, which evoked a sense of airy lightness that PH5 wanted to make essential to knitwear. The product? Sweet pinks, earth greens, hues of blues and yolk yellows in floating silhouettes. The effect? Wearable, textured and revolutionary fashion.
Take a look at what founder Wei Lin had to say about it.
On how the colors effect the designs: This collection is specifically inspired by balloons. So everything about the balloon’s shape, the balloon hems, the balloon colors, a lot of the primary hot air balloon colors. And these are coming when you release a lot of the smaller balloons up in the sky. And then the balloon’s lightness. A lot of our knitwear is very light, it feels very airy and very flowy.
On influences and innovation: So we are very innovative, we try to be very innovative. We are a knitwear brand but we try to stand out from a lot of the knitwear brands on the market where it’s more plain plain. We want to bring color and we want to bring technology, technique, texture. We want to play with knitwear and knitwear should not just only be plain plain, black, white and neutral. It should have color. It should have texture, it should have interesting stitches.
On choosing to work with knitwear: So this brand is me and my partner, Mijia. Mijia is the designer and I come from a factory background. So my parents run a knitwear factory and that’s where everything is made, in house. And we develop everything in house. That’s why we can be more playful and more, kind of, we can spend more money, more energy and resources on development, R and D, and do our own stitch and create our own things effectively.
On telling a story through fashion: So every season we are inspired by different artists. So the idea behind PH5 is we are an art meets science brand. Art comes from every season, coming from inspiration from some artist, science coming from we try to be novelty, we try to be technical and we try to break ground. We try to do high-tech, innovative stuff with knitwear so that’s the art meets science part. That’s the theme. I’m the science, she’s the art—she’s too much art!
On art that inspired PH5’s FW17 looks: Mijia got inspired by the artist called Martin Creed. It was the idea of balloons, the feeling of balloons. Not just the shape but the feeling of the balloon, the lightness, the flowy-ness, the colors of the balloons.
Photos courtesy of Sam Deitch.