Photo collage featuring three models in various outfits.

API indie designers dominated at Fashion Week this season

Writer Vandana Pawa highlights the Asian diasporic fashion designers who caught our eye with their spring/summer showcases

From left, designs by Shuting Qiu, Ahluwalia, and Keisukeyoshida hit the runway this season.

Photo illustration by Ryan Quan

Words by Vandana Pawa

Twice a year, fashion designers take to runways across major cities throughout the globe to showcase their latest collections. Asian designers, both from the continent and across the diaspora, have begun to take the fashion calendar by storm with younger, emerging designers making names for themselves in the industry. From Paris to Tokyo to London, these are our favorite independent labels that showed at Fashion Week this season.

Shuting Qiu
Paris Fashion Week

Designer Shuting Qiu, whose eponymous brand just had its Paris Fashion Week debut, is a bold, color-loving, maximalist’s best friend. Qiu is originally from China, where she also currently resides, and studied fashion in Belgium at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. According to the designer herself, the Shuting Qiu label seeks to embody “refined femininity, showcasing a modern romantic archetype that is bold, self-reliant, yet inherently delicate.” The brand’s clothing explores femininity in a way that is experimental, bright, and asymmetrical, and their latest collection is no exception.

Shuting Qiu’s romantic and whimsical spring/summer 2025 collection, which is titled The Palace Where Venus Descends, was inspired by the designer’s recent trip to Cyprus, the mythical birthplace of Venus. “Venus is the goddess of love, so I wanted my looks to be more romantic by adding moving elements such as fringes and flowers,” Qiu tells Vogue. The brand’s signature aesthetic includes bright colors and mismatching fabric, but this season’s visual language can also be attributed to Qiu’s collaborator on the collection: Chinese contemporary artist Lu Xinjian, who is known for his use of contrasting colors and abstract lines. Qiu’s commitment to sustainability also shines in this collection through her use of repurposed materials, like sequins and threads recycled from India and China. The designer even used leftover textiles to create smaller pieces meant for children. 

Despite spring/summer 2025 being the brand’s first time on the Paris Fashion Week calendar, Qiu’s no stranger to the global fashion stage. She showed for multiple seasons in Milan, and has a plethora of awards and prizes under her belt—the independent designer was a semifinalist for the LVMH Prize in 2021, as well as a finalist for the H&M Design Awards in 2020 and 2019. With the response to Qiu’s recent debut in Paris, the brand is clearly positioned for even more growth in the coming seasons. 

Keisukeyoshida
Tokyo Fashion Week

Japanese designer Keisuke Yoshida captured Tokyo when he debuted his eponymous brand in 2015 as a young, innovative designer. Yoshida often shows his collections at Tokyo Fashion Week, an event that is still growing and finding its place on the global fashion stage. Tailoring is key when it comes to Yoshida’s creations—pencil skirts, overcoats, and trousers are the name of the game for this label. While these pieces are a throughline for the brand across collections, he is not afraid to be avant-garde with his work, stepping out of the boundaries of what’s expected for sartorial styles.

This season did exactly that, with the soundtrack of a jet engine welcoming models down a long runway in what appears to be an empty warehouse. A flight attendant aesthetic in the collection matched the sounds accompanying the clothes, with pieces in navy, gray, black, and white dominating the color story. Pencil skirts and pants were tailored to perfection, but the true star of the brand’s latest collection is what Yoshida managed to create with the lining of a jacket. Look too quickly and you may dismiss many of the pieces as silky tops with what appear to be attached capes. However, it’s actually the product of Yoshida’s experimentation, where the designer has cut a hole in the lining of the jacket and reimagined how it could be worn as a dress in its own right, jacket still attached. “The lining stuck to the body, and it looked like bondage or an elegant dress,” he tells Vogue in an interview.

After collections depicting university uniforms, teenage angst and rebellion, and even bygone Parisian couture, Yoshida took his keen eye to the physical form to the next level this fashion week. As a brand that evolves constantly, Keisukeyoshida is one to watch in Japan, and beyond.

Ahluwalia
London Fashion Week

With roots in India, Nigeria, and England, designer Priya Ahluwalia of Ahluwalia often showcases her mixed heritage in her designs. Having studied menswear at the University of Westminster, Ahluwalia’s collections since launching her brand in 2018 prominently focus on androgynous clothing, and the brand has been showing both menswear and womenswear collections consistently during London Fashion Week. With a strong focus on craftsmanship and artisan work, the label also prioritizes sustainability, reflected in the brand’s mission: to unravel and challenge power dynamics that have long divided the Global North and South, to confront the historical and contemporary impacts of institutional racism, and to redefine who holds a place on fashion's coveted stage.

This season, Ahluwalia sought to explore the idea of "home" in a collection titled Home Sweet Home. This idea can be a complicated one for those in the diaspora, especially when you have roots and family histories across multiple borders. "I feel like home is a physical place, but it's also a concept. Like, how you could feel at home with a person, or you could feel at home on the other side of the world somewhere you love," she shares with Vogue. With this idea in mind, the pieces incorporated various bits of home design—a crocheted cotton doily as a top, retro wallpaper prints on a jacket, silky curtains draped as a dress. Each piece’s connection to this larger story showcased what makes the label special, which is the designer’s fearlessness in carving a home for herself in the often unwelcoming fashion world. 

With collaborations like Ahluwalia x GANNI and Ahluwalia x Levi’s under her belt, as well as awards from the British Fashion Council and beyond, Ahluwalia is well on her way towards achieving her mission.

Published on October 7, 2024

Words by Vandana Pawa

Vandana Pawa is a Bangkok-born, Brooklyn-based culture and fashion writer. You can find her on Twitter or Instagram @vandanaiscool.

Art by Ryan Quan

Ryan Quan is the Social Media Editor for JoySauce. This queer, half-Chinese, half-Filipino writer and graphic designer loves everything related to music, creative nonfiction, and art. Based in Brooklyn, he spends most of his time dancing to hyperpop and accidentally falling asleep on the subway. Follow him on Instagram at @ryanquans.