Fear washed over Robert Wun when the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, the governing body behind fashion weeks in Paris, invited him to make his runway debut in January 2023, giving him less than three months to put together his first-ever couture collection. “I had seen a Netflix series where the main character says something along the lines of ‘Getting what you always wanted is very scary,’ and that’s exactly how I felt,” Wun says. The honour, traditionally reserved for historic fashion houses based in Europe, is an opportunity granted to a handful of newcomers each season who undergo a stringent vetting process. “When I look back, though, I feel this is something I’ve been working towards my whole career; maybe I just didn’t know it yet,” he says.
It’s a frigid afternoon in December, but the designs are not one of them.
