London Fashion Week SS24 Highlights: 8ON8 switches up our daily commutes
8ON8 has made its grand return to London Fashion Week for the first time since the Covid Pandemic, with Li Gong’s ‘Peak Time Forest’ Spring Summer 2024 collection.
The collection is a utopian exploration of the mundane daily commute. The designer, Li Gong, invites the audience to re-imagine their repetitive routines and instead, ‘travel through forest and city to reach destinations not-yet known’. Spring Summer 2024 is a collision of two extreme environments, striving for neutralization of tension.
The designer told TheIndustry.fashion: "Imagine yourself living in the forest and at 8am you have to go to the city for work. So that's kind of like an escapism that is a combination between nature and human daily lives."
Gong references the dichotomy of commuters by juxtaposing traditional tailoring fabrications with outdoor-performance wear. In this way, he encompasses a 'multitude of varied perspectives'.
Li Gong continued: "Tailoring and sportswear are key elements of my brand and I try to push the possibilities of tailoring pieces to refresh them. Another way I want to apply the tailoring technique is on sportswear, to make him more thoughtful and well finished."
His playfullness is also clear to see, permeating the collection not only through accessories - such as school boy chic knee-high socks and boy-scout-meet-city-commuter style headwear - but also through daring silhouettes and proportions. For example, one ensemble gave business from the front and party in the back with a daringly low waist line that exposed the model's behind.
The cosmopolitan lifestyle was typified with avant-garde timepieces, which are worn as armbands or around the model’s thighs. As models hastily walked their commute – otherwise known as the runway - they also sported trainers from 8ON8’s footwear collaboration with Asics. The brand re-interpreted the classic Asics Kayano-Kayano14, in celebration of the silhouette's 30th anniversary, using three-dimensional line printing technology in gradient silver tones.
