What do Taiwanese snack packaging, Martian sunsets, the female gaze, and parasitised snails have in common? A place on the runway, obviously.
FJU Talents returned to Fashion Scout during London Fashion Week to celebrate its 10th anniversary. The showcase brought four Taiwanese designers together with work by alumni who have passed through the platform over the previous decade. Presented by Fu Jen Catholic University's Department of Textiles and Clothing, the showcase offered a reminder that fashion inspiration does not have to begin, or end, in a wardrobe.
Sometimes, designers get that spark from a day at the grocery store or by watching the day turn into night — on another planet.
Min-Hsin Yu: Sunsets From Two Different Worlds
For Min-Hsin Yu, one sunset was not enough. The textile design graduate looked to the contrasting sunsets of Earth and Mars, translating their colours into hand-crocheted pieces made in ribbon yarn.
Deep blues met warm orange-reds across layered, flowing surfaces. On the runway, the effect was especially striking in a pale-blue and navy ensemble with sweeping, sculptural folds, while another look moved through soft yellow and blue. The colour story was cosmic, but the craftsmanship brought it back down to Earth.
Yu's collection explores individuality as something constantly changing, rather than a fixed identity. If sunsets on two planets can look this different, perhaps there is no reason people's wardrobes should be expected to stay the same. Some designers think outside the box, and others think outside the planet.
Yui Kao: Love, Now Available in Snack Packaging
Yui Kao's Impulse Lover might be asking a hard-hitting question: when did finding love start feeling like selling a product?
The fashion design graduate imagines lovers packaged for someone else's approval, turning Taiwanese snack packaging into a riot of colour, oversized silhouettes, cord corsets, heart-shaped charms, and red tulle. On the runway, a bright yellow jacket met patterned shorts and towering black boots, while another look piled vivid red ruffles onto a print-heavy outfit. This is how Impulse Lover answers the question in the most fashionable, newfangled way possible.
The result is playful, provocative, and deliberately excessive. Beneath the visual sugar rush, Kao challenges conventional ideas about gender, desire, and how people present themselves to be wanted. After all, being someone's type should not require a barcode. Unless we're talking snack types. Those certainly come with barcodes.
Alison Lai: The Female Gaze Has Entered the Chat
Alison Lai first joined FJU Talents in 2019, founded her label (She)nanigans in 2024, and returned this year with a collection that has a few questions for the patriarchy. None of them appears to be multiple-choice.
Taking cues from David Lynch's Twin Peaks, Lai twisted traditional tailoring into something far less obedient. Black ensembles featured sharp, sculptural shapes and unexpected cut-outs, while distorted stripes refused to stay neatly in line. Then came the red: a gloriously dramatic look with fabric folding around the body and a headpiece that looked ready to steal the entire show. It's almost as if she deconstructed a power suit and puzzled it back together in ways no one would immediately recognise, but plenty might want in their wardrobes soon.
The collection examines how women's bodies are viewed, but Lai doesn't seem interested in dressing them for anyone else's approval. The clothes take up space, disrupt familiar silhouettes, and make their own rules. The female gaze isn't asking for a seat at the table. It's rearranging the furniture. The coalescence of female restraint and desire is a powerful message that might make the male gaze want to look elsewhere for a moment.
Ting Hsuan Chang: Snails Slowly but Surely Become Stylish
Of all the places to find fashion inspiration, parasitised snails probably weren't on anyone's London Fashion Week bingo card. Ting Hsuan Chang put them there anyway.
The Fu Jen Catholic University textile design graduate's collection, Cochlea, imagines a religion of its own to explore collective belief, free will, and the uncomfortable question of who is really in control. Inverse-rib knits create hypnotic optical patterns, while elaborate silhouettes give the whole thing an almost ceremonial air.
On the runway, orange and yellow ripples travelled across a fitted look with long knitted extensions trailing towards the floor. Elsewhere, electric green cut-outs and looping fabric turned the body into something that seemed part human, part otherworldly creature. It's refreshingly unsettling, oddly beautiful, and proof that a snail can go places beyond your backyard.
Ten Years In, Taiwanese Fashion Is Still Full of Surprises
The anniversary showcase also made room for the designers who helped FJU Talents get here. Six alumni were featured in its retrospective, with work spanning Xiaomo Chen's explorations of human and virtual identity, Zong Xing Liao's Zen-inspired restraint, and Chihwen Kuo's memory-laden knitwear. Alison Lai's earlier work appeared too, offering a glimpse of a different chapter in her practice.
FJU Talents has spent a decade bringing emerging Taiwanese design to an international audience. This year's line-up makes a persuasive case for what comes next: more experimentation, more individual voices, and absolutely no requirement that fashion inspiration make sense at first glance.
