Spring Summer 2027 began with a fascination for objects that seem to carry traces of another life. Antique silverware, old jewellery, and domestic curiosities found their way into Oscar Ouyang’s world, where their meanings began to shift. A hand-crocheted pine nut, for instance, reappears as precious silver jewellery.

Somewhere along the way, a swan appeared.

It swims quite literally across a pair of tiny knitted shorts, but soon becomes something closer to a character for the season—graceful, peculiar, romantic, and perhaps a little self-conscious about the whole thing. Ouyang had been thinking about the uncertain interval between adolescence and adulthood, when familiar objects, clothes, and gestures suddenly acquire new meanings. Everything can feel either completely euphoric or absolutely devastating, sometimes before lunch.

There is something of a teenager assembling an idea of adulthood from what came before. A mother’s earrings, an old evening bag, a father’s dinner jacket: fragments of other people’s lives become material for imagining your own. Dressing for one of the first supposedly important nights of your life becomes an experiment in who you might be, and how you might want to be seen.

The clothes inhabit the same uncertainty. A polo opens too far. Shorts have too many darts. Tailoring behaves impeccably from the front before opening unexpectedly across the back, while satin duchesse lends utilitarian clothing an unexpected gleam. Masculine archetypes remain recognizable, but something is always slightly off—loosened, softened, made precious, or allowed to show some skin. Masculinity is the starting point, never the conclusion.

Then summer takes over. Running shorts puff into abbreviated barrel shapes, ruffles tumble from silk-linen knits, and crochet catches tiny flashes of light. Pale pink, blue, cream, and silver have the fugitive quality of colours gently bleached by the sun. Decoration is allowed to be decorative and prettiness is not treated with suspicion.

Womenswear slips naturally into the same world, lighter and more diaphanous rather than entirely separate from it. Knitted and woven structures interrupt one another throughout, as the distinctions between masculine and feminine, formal and casual, precious and ordinary become similarly unstable.

Ouyang will show the collection at Rochelle, the former school in East London, where all this youthful romanticism has somewhere to loiter.

School’s out. The swans are in their shorts.

Words by Alex Kessler