Robert Wun—the Hong Kong–born, London-based designer dressing Lady Gaga, Celine Dion, and Billy Porter—talks to Mission about designing against the grain and the virtues of being stubborn.
“Nobody’s paying attention, nobody cares about what you do,” fashion designer Robert Wun says from the East London studio of his eponymous label. “As long as you love what you do, that’s all that matters.” Far from nihilistic, Wun’s assessment of external validation is more akin to a liberated, sort of who-gives-a-fuck school of thought that allows him to work from a place of pure instinct and creativity, untethered by external accolades and approval. The truth is, however, when it comes to Wun’s creations—demi-couture exercises in exaggeration that are both head-scratchingly sculptural and technically precise—he has both accolades and approval in spades.
Launched in 2014, Robert Wun’s namesake label focuses on elegant, graphic, architectural pieces, spectacularly bold and smacking of sci-fi (Wun names his muses as Trinity from The Matrix and Ripley from Aliens). His meteoric rise saw his creations ricochet from the runway to the red carpet to the silver screen, having dressed the likes of Lady Gaga (who has sported his horned platform boots more than once), Cardi B, and Celine Dion, as well as being commissioned to design costumes for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2. Most recently, actor Billy Porter, who is celebrated for his fashion-forward approach and subverting fashion’s gender norms by wearing gowns on the red carpet, chose a look from Wun’s autumn/winter 2021 collection: an interplay of corsetry and cascading pleats in a discordant color palette. Then there’s Wun’s nomination for the International Woolmark Prize, a commission from the Royal Ballet, and of course the column mileage of adoring press coverage, which this writer is delighted to lengthen.
But it wasn’t always like this. After moving to London from his hometown of Hong Kong to attend the London College of Fashion, a particularly inelegant tutor advised him—to his face, no less—that his portfolio was “childish.” Wun was too often left feeling unsupported by his tutors, culminating in the final act of being unceremoniously left out of his graduation procession. When asked what bolstered him against the negativity and kept him fixed on his vision, Wun credits his “stubbornness.” I suggest that “audacity” might be a more forgiving term, but on this point Wun is, well, stubborn.
“I have this whole input-output system that my mum taught me about always being open-minded to all kinds of opinions, but it’s up to you and your own integrity to filter out what is actually meaningful,” Wun says. “I always go back to what I initially believed in. And knowing what people have felt or expressed [contradictorily] makes me focus even more on what I want to do, but refine it even more so that I can convince people who don’t believe in that certain type of aesthetic that it could be good. If it’s something that has never been done before, it’s hard for people to visualize. So I always say I’m just stubborn enough to believe in that little image in my head, to see if I can do better in [the eyes of critics] but without changing my direction for them or getting belittled by negative opinions.”
It’s a hangover from a childhood mentality of walking to the beat of his own drum. Wun was born and raised in Hong Kong, in a house filled with exotic pets spread out over several tens of aquariums: pythons, fish, frogs, land and water turtles, chameleons, and salamanders. He passed the time re-creating his reptilian friends in drawings and from artificial twigs and rocks. “I never really fit into a certain mold in Hong Kong,” he says. “I think it happens in a lot of East Asian countries. In East Asia, they are looking for children to be particularly good in two fields—athletics and academics. I was not good in either of those areas. I just loved drawing and being creative.”
His interest in fashion hit early, at age 12, through an older friend who had just started a fashion design course. A close bond formed as fashion began to walk hand-in-hand with teenage soul searching. “She introduced me to what it meant to study or design fashion, and at the same time, I was slowly discovering my other passion of human identity—what clothing means to a human in terms of self-expression,” says Wun.
Having grown up visiting his grandparents in Wimbledon, a decamp to London wasn’t a completely left-of-center choice. It wasn’t long before he was accepted into the aforementioned London College of Fashion and developed his signature aesthetic. A word that gets thrown around a lot when discussing Wun’s collections is “futurism,” but for Wun, this doesn’t mean what you think it might. “To me, futurism is not ‘Oh, let’s make something out of Star Wars.” It’s more about moving forward. For me, futurism means optimism, looking for things that haven’t been done before—a silhouette that has never been assembled, materials that have never been realized in a particular way. It’s more about the imaginary. There’s something very nice about humanity and what it means to be moving forward, and that’s how I like to see myself. Doing something new, something bold that is based on your imaginary world but that still connects with people.”
Of similar importance to Wun’s aesthetic is the word “feminism,” with most of his collections inspired by the powerful women who surround him, whether friends or family, famous or fictitious. Take his autumn/winter 2021 collection, Armour, for example. It pays homage to Wun’s late paternal grandmother, a formidable matriarch who forged a career while raising Wun’s father on her own as a single mother. The motif of a swallow bird—a favorite of Wun’s grandmother and a native to Hainan Island, where she was born—features heavily in the collection. The swallowtail shape is seen throughout: draped at the end of sleeves, cut across asymmetric hems, and rounding out the jagged panels of disjointed trouser flares. At first glance, Wun’s designs appear tough, as though fashioned from metal, but upon closer inspection, panels in shocks of magenta, cyan, or canary are rendered soft and fluid in sunray and folded pleats.
When asked who he sees wearing his pieces, he says, “My aesthetic can lean more toward the borderline of costume, but it’s something that’s just very unapologetic as well. Women, or anyone who chooses to wear them—they know they own it. Some people might feel ‘Oh, this isn’t fashion, because it doesn’t make you look ‘nice.’ But there’s so much ‘nice’ shit out there, you can just wear that. You don’t have to come to me for nice shit. That’s not what I do, really.”
