Viviano Sue’s fall collection was a personal reckoning for the designer, and the diasporic identity he’s spent his adult life grappling with. With a childhood fractured between the US, China, and Japan, Sue spoke of how he’d never felt like he belonged anywhere, and had struggled to find his community.
Fast forward to now, and Sue has built his own community here in Tokyo, the city he now finally calls home. Every season his front row is packed with a brightly dressed gaggle of celebrities, influencers, and superfans who beg to come to his shows, and put on their flounciest Viviano getups to do so. Tonight there were more of them than ever; the pressure was on.
“I’ve never done a collection as personal as this before,” he said after the show, which unfolded in the carpeted corridors of a Neo-Baroque manor house on the grounds of the Grand Prince Hotel. “It’s about looking back at when I was little, and the things and people that surrounded me in Shanghai; hearing my mom and my auntie talking in English and Cantonese, the lace, all of the things that surrounded me at the time. Sometimes, memories can feel even fresher than the things we see in front of us right now.”
Those memories came through in the blue and white prints on the quilted dresses that recalled Chinese porcelain, in the tassels that dangled from Pankou fastenings, and rich red and black lace that simultaneously exposed and suffocated. Viviano’s signature tulle, saccharine colors, and polka dot hearts made their usual appearance, but it was in the darker moments that the collection thrived. Delving into that murky emotional territory clearly took some bravery from Sue, and it paid off. “I wasn’t a happy child at all,” he smiled. “But I’m happy now.”
