BY JAY AQUINO

JULY 13, 2026

Sean Suen’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection begins with a comic image and turns it into a serious proposition about menswear, the familiar summer gesture of rolling a shirt above the stomach. In less capable hands, the reference could have collapsed into a runway gimmick. Suen instead uses it to expose how uniforms regulate the male body and how quickly those rules become unstable once a hem rises, a waistband doubles, or a collar slips from position.

Hidden One marks a reflective moment for the Beijing-based designer, arriving as he looks back on a decade of showing in Paris. Suen founded his label in 2012 and entered the Paris menswear calendar in 2017, building a narrative around tailoring, volume, and Chinese cultural references. Here, that design world becomes more personal and less guarded. The opening charcoal suit retains broad shoulders and generous pleats, but white shirting protrudes beneath a knitted waist panel, while a leather belt cuts across the torso. The suit remains legible, even as its construction refuses immediate explanation.

An oversized blue shirt and striped shorts splice the school uniform with sleepwear, while a cropped taupe button-down frames the abdomen as two competing waistlines turn exposure into pattern cutting. More convincing still is the grey shirt gathered open by cords above monumental trousers, where exposure is controlled through drape and proportion.

Suen is most persuasive when the idea is resolved through cut, proportion, and construction. A glossy black bustier over a white shirt could easily become a blunt statement on gender. Instead, the patent bodice, grey tie, and wide pleated trousers create a hierarchy of surfaces and proportions in which no single code dominates. The Pour Lui underwear collaboration extends this method, allowing intimate garments to disturb the apparent order of European shirting and formal trousers.

Not every idea lands with the same force, with the repeated knitted waist panels and protruding shirttails occasionally reading as signatures before they reveal anything new. A leather jacket wraps diagonally like displaced drapery, while a tuxedo lapel expands into a white sash that has to be followed across the body before its logic becomes clear.

Suen reveals the stomach, chest, and construction beneath the suit, but the wearer never becomes easy to define. The collection exposes familiar menswear from the inside, loosening the codes of shirts, tailoring, underwear, and formal dress until they begin to behave differently on the body. The more the clothes disclose, the less fixed the wearer becomes, leaving menswear not weakened by vulnerability but made more complex by it.

Discover Sean Suen here.