Taipei Fashion Week Takes Its Cue From The Film Industry
Taiwan has long narrated its spirit through cinema, and this season its fashion scene steps behind the camera. Taipei Fashion Week SS26 launches on October 16 with a theme that leans into screencraft, reframing the runway as storytelling in motion. The event is positioning itself as a creative handshake between an internationally admired film community and a fashion industry eager to scale its own global impact.
When Style Meets the Silver Screen
Under the banner “Fashion, Action!”, Taipei’s new season embraces a cinematic mindset from concept to casting. Actress Ivy Shao fronts the campaign, flanked by film-world collaborators—cinematographers, set designers, and stylists—who treat the catwalk like a living set. The VIP opener brings six Taiwanese designers together to translate celebrated dramas, from The Cleaner to The World Between Us II, into wardrobes that carry the same emotional beats and narrative arcs as their source material.
A Cross-Disciplinary Creative Engine
Taiwan’s culture sector is built on free expression, tech fluency, and a willingness to collaborate across mediums—ingredients that produced some of Asia’s most nuanced films and are now powering fashion’s next leap. Backed by institutions such as TAICCA and the Ministry of Culture, emerging labels are proving that a compact island can think on a cinematic scale, exporting ideas bigger than its footprint. The result is a runway ecosystem that is democratic in spirit, rooted in local stories, and fearless in experimentation.
Seven Designers, One Evolving Identity
Ray Chu
Ray Chu channels the openness and resilience of contemporary Taiwan into sleek, future-facing silhouettes. Natural forms—like manta rays and crinum lilies—become motifs for courage and individuality, expressed through upcycling, 3D-printed details, and vivid digital imagery. For Chu, luxury is less about opulence and more about intention: pieces designed with care, built to last, and mindful of their footprint.
Charles Tang (Tangtsungchien)
Trained in Paris and based in Taichung, Charles Tang starts every collection with touch and texture. Materials lead the narrative, yielding garments that look effortless yet carry conceptual depth. His work distills a modern Taiwanese sensibility—open, witty, and relaxed—into silhouettes that feel easy to wear and intellectually crafted. With stronger industry infrastructure and digital tools, he sees Taiwan’s fashion momentum accelerating.
CHOW des HOMME
Chow treats fashion as a barometer of the times. Each collection riffs on the push-pull of tradition and progress that defines Taiwan today, with tailoring and street-coded elements meeting at a generational pulse point. The brand’s stance is grounded in resilience—absorbing cultural shifts and reflecting them back as precise, contemporary menswear.
damur (Damur Huang)
Splitting his life between Taipei and Berlin, Damur Huang designs for a world that refuses binaries. His label champions gender freedom, body positivity, and an unabashed mix of textures, humor, and sensuality. Beneath the playful shock value is pragmatic discipline—a resourcefulness that prizes smart execution and clear commercial thinking. Creativity must connect with people, he argues, and the most meaningful work empowers them to live boldly.
Seivson (Jame Hsieh)
For Jame Hsieh, quiet strength is an aesthetic. Seivson collections often begin with an emotion or story, then resolve into pieces that balance tenderness with structure. Luxury, in her view, is the cumulative power of details—craft elevated into something emotionally resonant. As local audiences increasingly embrace homegrown design, Hsieh aims to keep Seivson’s Taiwanese character intact while expanding its international reach.
Jenn Lee
A long-standing name on the global circuit, Jenn Lee’s tenth-anniversary show at London Fashion Week SS26 fused fashion and technology with an interactive VR installation. Audiences could explore environments and garments virtually, underscoring how design can be reborn as a digital experience. Her ongoing Zipper Series captures this hybrid ethos, weaving craft, sustainable materials, and tech into adaptable, experimental statements—an outlook that mirrors Taiwan’s agile, youthful democracy and resonates with VR-native audiences.
Story Wear (Kuan Chen)
Story Wear proves that sustainability and sharp design can amplify one another. The label remakes post-consumer textiles into crisply cut garments, produced locally in collaboration with women from underrepresented communities. It’s a circular model with a human pulse: materials and lives both get a second act. From denim offcuts reborn as tailored jackets to reworked uniforms transformed into vests, each piece carries a narrative of renewal that has become a staple presence at Taipei Fashion Week.
Daniel Wong
With roots at Central Saint Martins and experience in luxury print design, Daniel Wong turns patterns into a language of optimism. His signatures—vivid yet refined prints—broadcast themes of courage, freedom, and curiosity, aligning with a forward-looking Taiwanese attitude. That clarity of message has helped the brand gain traction across Asia’s luxury markets, underscoring the commercial strength of Taiwan’s creative exports.
Runway as Cinematic Experience
What emerges this season is a unified proposition: Taiwan’s fashion identity thrives when it borrows the grammar of film—scene-setting, character, emotional pacing—and merges it with fabric innovation and social consciousness. SS26 sharpens that point. From VR-enhanced storytelling to upcycled couture, from texture-first tailoring to playful cross-cultural mashups, the runway reads like a storyboard of where Taiwan is heading next. In a landscape where images travel faster than words, Taipei Fashion Week is betting that a filmic approach can carry its designers far beyond the island—and into the global imagination.
