For Childsplay, his FW26 Couture collection at the Dôme de Paris, Robert Wun asked what happens when haute couture looks through the innocent eyes of a child. The answer involves balloons, and it is not what you expect.
The Dôme de Paris is exactly what it promises: a single great arc of ceiling rising overhead, the kind of space that makes you look up before you look around. The show’s set and lighting designers knew exactly how to use this grande structure. A large ring of light projected down onto the carpet placed the dome both above you and underfoot, the architecture answering itself. Between looks, models paused and held, the kind of silence that only couture seems to ask for, and the room settled into that ceremony willingly.
Robert Wun: The First Hong Kong-Born Designer at Paris Couture Week
Robert Wun was born in Hong Kong and is based in London. He graduated from London College of Fashion and was first discovered when Joyce Boutique picked up his graduate collection. Later, he founded his label in 2014. He is the first Hong Kong-born designer to debut at Paris Couture Week, a fact that still deserves more than a footnote. Childsplay is his FW26 collection and the third couture show of a brand quietly making one of the more interesting arguments in fashion right now.
The Un-Serious, Taken Seriously
The collection’s name is a provocation. “Childsplay” implies something easy, unsophisticated, beneath consideration. Couture, by every definition, is none of those things. The tension is the point. Wun has structured the collection as a timeline of growing up: from the child as “plain paper,” to being colored, then shaped and formed, characters built like toys, stories giving way to something like dreams. The question underneath all of it is not sentimental. It is closer to asking what we lose in the process of becoming serious, and whether any of it can be recovered.
A Balloon Seller, a Cinderella, a Spinning Ballerina
The show opened with a white ballroom-silhouette dress splattered in vibrant, Jackson Pollock-like splotches, paired with paint-covered gloves and a toy rabbit. From there: vibrantly colored space helmets, fascinators shaped like ballerina music boxes, a hat topped with an actual spinning ballerina figurine. A floor-length blue dress paid direct homage to Cinderella, its angular heart-shaped bodice strung with oversized ribbons that appeared to float. A pink tutu with a rigid bodice whose edges looked deliberately melted. An enormous glittered butterfly perched on a chest.
