Presented at Milano Fashion Week, JAREL ZHANG's "Misty Realm" Autumn/Winter 2025 collection shows the beauty lying in the undefined.
About Misty Realm Autumn/Winter 2025 Collection: Concept And Inspiration
JAREL ZHANG's latest collection presented at Milano Fashion Week is a journey through the veil of the unknown, in a somehow familiar yet mysterious setting. In the hush of dawn, when the world is neither fully awake nor entirely asleep, a mist drapes over the landscape like a silent enigma. It obscures and reveals, unsettles and soothes. This ethereal in-between is the essence of JAREL ZHANG's Autumn/Winter 2025 collection: Misty Realm, an exploration of uncertainty, perception, and the beauty of the intangible.
“Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow.” – T.S. Eliot
Inspired by the interplay of clarity and obscurity, Misty Realm transcends the tangible, inviting the audience into a world where the known dissolves into the unknown. The collection embraces the philosophy of liminality –that threshold state where transformation is imminent but undefined. Much like fog softens the edges of reality, the garments blur the lines between structure and fluidity, presence and absence, solidity and air.
About The Collection: Sartorial Touches
Layered silhouettes unfold like veils of mist, concealing and revealing in an elegant paradox. Fabrics – sheer organza, diaphanous mesh, and voluminous wool – evoke the gravity of uncertainty and the levity of possibility. Reflective surfaces mimic the shifting light on fog-wrapped landscapes, while distorted prints and asymmetric cuts embody the impermanence of perception.
The colour story of Misty Realm is drawn from the silent drama of the sky at dawn and dusk: smoky greys, spectral whites, deep nocturnal blues, and flickers of ember red, reminiscent of distant lights glimpsed through fog. This interplay of muted and vibrant hues distorts and reshapes reality like mist.
Echoes of Philosophy
The Shanghai designer conceived a collection that is also an invitation to embrace the Socratic paradox – “I know that I know nothing.” In a world that often demands clarity, Misty Realm proposes that ambiguity is not an obstacle but an opening, a space where meaning is not fixed but continuously unfolding. It echoes Nietzsche’s concept of the abyss – when one gazes into the unknown, the unknown gazes back.
The Presentation: An Immersive Realm
Set within a futuristic, immersive space inside Milan’s Caselli di Porta Sempione, the Misty Realm presentation transcended the traditional fashion showcase, evolving into a multisensory, dreamlike experience. Here, reality fractures, perception flows, and time suspends in an otherworldly dimension.
Shifting fog veils the venue, shaping a realm of weightless liminality, where figures emerge and fade like echoes of another reality. Mirrored installations distort reflections into infinite possibilities, bending space and time. Colour-saturated lights – spectral blues, pulsating ember reds – cast a holographic glow, morphing the space into a cybernetic dreamscape.
The experience is further amplified by a hypnotic, ambient soundscape, a fusion of futuristic synth waves and ethereal, pulsating rhythms, evoking the sensation of drifting through an uncharted realm of consciousness. The models move fluidly, like spectres navigating an undefined world, embodying the transient nature of time and perception.
In this fusion of technology, illusion, and sensory immersion, Misty Realm invites the audience to step beyond the familiar and into a post-reality dimension, where beauty lies not in what is seen, but in what is felt: an invitation to embrace the infinite unknown.
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