Robert Wun finally steps into the spotlight

Robert Wun has dressed Cardi B for her “Money” music video, Billy Porter for his Pose premiere in New York, and Abbott Elementary creator and star Quinta Brunson for the latest Critics’ Choice Awards, but he has never held a fashion show. After eight years at the helm of his eponymous label, the designer will finally make his debut during haute couture week in Paris on January 26.

The show represents a turning point for 31-year-old Wun, who will show alongside household names such as Dior, Chanel and Fendi.

“We just found out at the end of the year,” he says over Zoom from his London studio two weeks before the show. “To suddenly jump from doing a lookbook shot in my studio with my iPhone to this level, it’s always going to give a lot of anxiety, but we are marching on.”

Haute couture was once both the backbone and the essence of the fashion industry, but today only 16 designers continue to produce these rarefied, bespoke and mostly handmade clothes for an elite clientele estimated to number in the single thousands. The rest of the industry has pivoted to ready-to-wear.

Because there are so few bona fide haute couture houses, the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode also invites a small number of designers to show as “guest members” at couture week, such as Wun.

The past two years have been momentous for the Hong Kong-born designer. Wun launched his brand in 2014 with the help of an anonymous external investor, two years after graduating from London College of Fashion. (The brand is now fully owned by Wun and his sister, who helped him buy the brand back in 2016 and is uninvolved in day-to-day operations.) Initially working as a one-person team in his east London studio, his sculptural designs won the attention of Solange, Cardi B and Céline Dion, but he largely operated on the sidelines of the London fashion scene, receiving little or no support, he says, from the capital’s fashion institutions and press.

“When it comes to being on the [fashion week] schedule or being on a certain radar, I just was never lucky enough,” he says.

Things took a turn in April 2021 with the release of his autumn/winter collection, a tribute to his grandmother called Armour, which led to coverage in Vogue, Interview Magazine and Dazed. Hollywood stylists took note, with Tracee Ellis Ross, Noomi Rapace, Danai Gurira and Letitia Wright all donning Wun in recent appearances.

In July, Wun received the official industry recognition he long craved, winning the €100,000 Andam 2022 Prix Spécial. The prize, which is awarded by a jury that includes Chanel president of fashion Bruno Pavlovsky, brought a series of new opportunities to the designer, including an invite from the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode to show as a guest member during haute couture week.

“It almost feels like I took a very long shortcut, that’s what I call it,” he says. “I did all these years with nothing and then suddenly I got to see the dream come true.”

The Armour collection also marked a financial breakthrough. Order levels were so high that Wun didn’t release a new collection for three seasons, focusing instead on adding to his team (which now counts seven people full-time). According to the designer, the business, which is now profitable, generated half a million pounds in sales in 2022 and is projected to bring in £1.5mn this year. 

Wun is bewildered as to why that particular collection resonated. There are no dramatic aesthetic differences between Armour and his previous releases, no obvious changes in direction that can justify such a different response from the industry. Wun shot the collection lookbook himself, using his iPhone 11 in his kitchen, creating a makeshift photographic set using LED lights, cardboard and a piece of black fabric.

“In the middle of my path, I was a bit lost,” he says. “There were a lot of voices telling me, ‘you should do some T-shirts,’ or ‘you should talk about your identity’ . . . I finally feel that it’s OK that when you are doing a brand with your name on the label, it’s unapologetically you.”

Wun’s designs are singular and often described as “futuristic”; his collections reflect a creative vision free of the influence of seasonal trends. He is inspired by organic, natural and animal shapes that he reimagines with the use of pleats, folds and ruffles, asymmetrical cuts and layering. A 2019 design called the Fighting Fish Coat combines sheets of micro-pleated silver fabric that radiate externally from the wearer, recalling the large, flowing fins of the south-east Asian fish. Scalloped edges and sinuous cuts turn the wearer of his matching jacket and trouser set from spring/summer 2020 into a denim-clad orchid mantis. In his spring/summer 2023 collection, 150 metres of purple pleated lamé transform a brushed cashmere coat into a dramatic gown inspired by a violet starling. 

These are designs that clearly belong to the world of couture, special commissions and red carpets rather than ready-to-wear, but Wun only changed his business model to made-to-order in 2020, after the release of his spring/summer 2021 collection.

“We got more orders than with wholesale and it was a wake-up call,” he says. “I had been trying to force myself to become a designer that I’m not by overthinking what the model is out there.” He now works with about 50 clients, mostly based in the US and Middle East, who pay between £10,000 and £200,000 for his bespoke designs. His studio can process between 10 to 15 orders per month, each order requiring between five working weeks and three months to complete depending on the complexity.

“Haute couture was never on my mind because I thought that was unreachable,” he says. “But my method of work has always been about craftsmanship, creating each piece by each piece.” The support, recognition and encouragement he has recently received from Paris has given him a boost of confidence, as well as a new perspective on his work. “It means that I’m on the right path, like, I’m actually good enough.”

For his first runway collection, Wun has been channelling the fear and anxiety he is feeling in approaching such a pivotal moment in his career to create designs that will, he hopes, read as a haute couture of and for our times.

“It’s about me challenging the idea of designing something so precious that you are very afraid of what is going to happen to it,” he says. “What if the very things that we are most afraid of — the staining, the ruining, the breaking — is the inspiration itself? Instead of turning a woman into a beautiful flower — which is a very old concept for me — what if she is embracing fear and being empowered by it? Nothing is more beautiful to me.”

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