Li-Ning on the international stage at Paris Men's Fashion Week

In China, Li-Ning is an iconic  and successful sports brand named after their star Olympian.

China's iconic sports brand Li-Ning, named after the Chinese star Olympian,

will celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2020.

And now its ambition is to conquer the world, especially after a successful introduction in its home country at retailers like Lane Crawford. Li-Ning’s elevated runway collection, now in its fourth season, continues to expand its global distribution at a range of high-end retailers and specialty sneaker boutiques including KITH, SSENSE, LN-CC, Slam Jam, END Clothing, Oki-Ni, Selfridges, and END Clothing to name a few.

The sports brand has now presented for the second time at Paris Men’s Fashion Week. This season the event was in a show space inside the Lycée Turgot in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris.  Within the custom set, graphics from the collection adorned the hyper-colour, multi-layer walls; with seating arranged in a maze-like format.

Models walked the labyrinth to an eclectic Chinese soundtrack, ’90s hip hop, and abstract Jazz, revealing the collection to a front-row crowd that included world champion skier Eileen Gu, Chinese performer Ayunga, singer Can Chengyu, and Lucas Jagger, as well as Mr. Li-Ning himself, who took in the show alongside his daughter Xiaoyan.

Mr. Li-Ning at the Paris catwalk alongside his daughter Xiao-yan.

Li-Ning finds the inspiration for its latest collection in ping-pong—or simply known as table tennis in the West, the Chinese national sport that commands a fervor greater than basketball, baseball, or soccer and one in which China has won 28 of 32 Olympic gold medals since its introduction in 1988.

For Spring/Summer 2020, the simple ping-pong polo informed the design direction of the entire collection, which offers easy shapes and voluminous silhouettes cut away from the body.

For an airy look, Li-Ning has used a set of new, ultra-lightweight fabrics for an array of coats and shirts, trousers and shorts, bags and accessories and footwear. 

In its styling and coloruways, the collection fused nostalgia and futurism.

SS20 highlights include deconstructed, zip-away Mackintosh coats trimmed in contrasting piping and affixed with patches, layered paperweight anoraks in contrasting tones of khaki and yellow, oversized polo—short or long-sleeved, striped, patterned, patched, piped, open V-neck, or zip-neck with vintage-inspired circular pulls. The breezy look carried through to the women’s range: females wore long tennis dresses darted with contrast stitching, as well as zip-away track coats and waisted track dresses. And for all genders, Li-Ning reimagined its signature garment—the track suit—in a wild range of colors, materials, and techniques, each of them at home on the ping-pong courts of yesterday or today.

Across all apparel, Li-Ning made strong use of vintage-inspired graphics including repeating paddle prints, abstract collages, comic book sketches, and the critical number 11, which was assigned to Mr. Li during the 1984 Summer Olympics.

LGN by Louis Gabriel Nouchi launches a poetic collection for SS20

Although LGN is a very young brand, founded in Paris in 2017 by Louis Gabriel Nouchi who was trained at l’Ecole des arts visuels de la Cambre, he has had worked for Vogue and Raf Simons, and now widely recognized for his commercial success and creative ability, having launched capsule collections with Galeries Lafayette, la Redoute, Damart and more recently for the honored French luxury accessories brand, Agnelle.  Previously his work earned a nomination at the Hyères Festival in 2014, where he was awarded the Camper and Palais de Tokyo Prizes.

This season, at Paris Men's Fashion Week, he calls his SS20 collection The Skin,  as the designer is entering a new cycle of inspirations based on the iconic Italian writer, Curzio Malaparte.

As literature is an essential starting point of all LGN’s collection, according to the brand, “THE SKIN” takes place during the liberation of Napoli by the US army in 1943 when soldiers discovered through the eyes of the narrator, which is supposed to be the writer Malaparte, on how to face the reality of war."

The collection however is not played out in full military style but rather leaning towards a poetic direction featuring old-time elegance as silhouettes are constructed as patchwork of technical details between print, knitwear and dyeing techniques. The colour palette is based on the an ancient Italian city.  Classic pieces are delicately sloughing to reveal Italian marble pattern, like distilled through history.

There are military details adding functionality to classic 1940’s tailoring, teaming with grunge details, and the LGN signature  is manifested through raw edges, "destroyed" sleeves and hem that seems to  refer to the poetry of ruins in romantic paintings, showing the violence of human behavior, nature and time.

The oversized silhouette works well for a layered, tailoring look.

Patterns appear through tattoo-like prints, images "spinning joy and pains of soldier on missions, translate the deepest moment and becoming another skin."

"Like a banner of intimate memories. It is carrying sensibility and a history in every clothes, showing the world what the man has been through."

The collection is a message based on the book imagery. A message of love, coming for peace in this amount of violence.