Huishan Zhang Resort 2027

Reported by Vogue.

There's a particular kind of designer who resists the obvious — who takes a reference and lets it breathe until it becomes something else entirely. Huishan Zhang is that designer. For Resort 2027, he chose Marella Agnelli as his muse: Italian aristocrat, Truman Capote's "swan," one of the most photographed women of the 1960s. But according to Vogue, Zhang wasn't interested in costume or nostalgia. He was after something more slippery — the idea of transformation.

That concept landed most convincingly in the layering. Cashmere cardigans, impossibly soft, draped over dresses or anchored to embellished pencil skirts — the kind of dressing that suggests a woman who edits herself throughout the day rather than committing to a single look at 7 a.m. "This is what I imagine she'd wear now," Zhang said of Agnelli. "I wish I could've met her." It's a telling remark. The collection reads less like a tribute and more like an imagined conversation across decades.

Architecture and Ease

Zhang's signature vocabulary — floral brocade, appliqué, embroidery — got a deliberate upgrade, scaled up and made three-dimensional rather than applied as surface decoration. The silhouettes in the upper half took cues from Richard Avedon's portraits of Agnelli: longline, structured, unhurried. A top with a cascading neck tie paired with tailored trousers landed as one of the sharper moments, the kind of combination that reads as genuinely new rather than archive-adjacent.

Where the collection shifted most unexpectedly was at the close. Zhang, known for angular, architecturally full silhouettes, sent out closing dresses cut from lightweight crepe jersey — body-skimming, fluid, unbuttoned from his usual precision. They didn't abandon his point of view so much as reveal another layer of it, which is exactly the kind of risk a resort collection rarely bothers to take.

Zhang continues to prove that the so-called secondary collections are where a designer's real instincts surface — and his are quietly, consistently sharp.

Read the original at Vogue.