The Taiwanese fashion brand INF, which just participated in the London Fashion Week last month, again released its latest works at Taipei Fashion Week.  This season, INF inspired by Taiwanese traditional culture and, for the first time combined the century-old traditional folk culture of Tainan „Yanshui Beehive Fireworks“, published its 23SS new collection „Kî-Tó“.

„Kî-Tó“ is Taiwanese words for ‘to pray’or ‘to bless’. Folklore said that the Yanshui Tainan once had a huge plaque and caused many deaths in the late 19 century.  The panic survivors were instructed by the local deity to set off fireworks on the evening of the Lantern Festival until dawn and, amazingly, later the epidemic subsided.  Since then, the local people have kept the custom ever since for over 137 years and make  „Yanshui Beehive Fireworks festival” became one of the most famous folk festivals in the world.

This year, INF invited visual art team Hellobastworkshop to join for this fashion show.  INF and Hellobastworkshop, two teams with different backgrounds, started from scratch, brainstormed, and created a nearly ten-meter-long visual art installation, which was used for models to perform the catwalk, to not only recreate the vibe while be in the fiteworks festival also indicate a new form of traditional festival which is more environmentally friendly, zero-waste. The background of the installation imitates the archway of the temple, and the viewer seats were using traditional red plastic chairs, matched with the smokes and music that viewers could experience firework shelling through sight, hearing and touch. The venue will create a brand new 4D immersive experience of the firework festival and contemporary art together with fashion design.

INF 23SS was inspired by firework explosion, and used mass concentric circles as the pattern. Through the structure of scattering and convergence, combined with the arrangement of fringes as the clothing pattern and the shoulder straps with bifurcation design, the cannon explosion is presented. Creativity, burst into clothing. The printing part captures the moment when the bee cannon is cast, and captures it with digital drawing. At the same time, it inherits the deconstruction style that the brand is good at, continuously dismantles and reshapes the orthodox pattern, outlines a variety of continuation concentric circle structures, and once again presents the deformation function design of one garment and multiple wear. INF continues to deconstruct and reshape the representative clothing of men and women. In today’s gender-ambiguous era, it has opened up more feminine dresses and open-back styles. At the same time, it also continues to maintain the brand DNA of classic dark style. There are still several pure styles. Black design.

It is also worth mentioning that two looks in the show, the models wear helmets, and the overall colors are laid out in red and yellow with ancient bless sentence printing on, this is the „formal attire“ you need to wear when participating in the Yanshui Beehive Firework festival. These two sets of shapes are created with the concept of high protection. In response, INF has developed special fabrics. Through modern science, flame retardant is added to the outer layer of the fabric for protection. When the fabric touches sparks, it will only be carbonized, and the sparks will be quickly extinguished to prevent the bee cannon. INF hopes to provide practical fashion clothing with a sense of design and safety guarantee, increase the attention of traditional culture, and also hope to reduce the danger of activities through the power of the brand.

This event invites veteran hard-core actor Gao Jie, the new generation idol group Atomic Youth champion team Uranus, and high-traffic YouTuber Tommy who promotes Taiwanese and Japanese culture to appear on the stage. The new generation actor Huang Guanzhi, who has been nominated for the Golden Bell Award again, will be the opening guest. . The audience of the show were also dazzling with stars. The super popular Rakutengirls Lin Xiang (Mizuki), Douhua girl Cai Huangru, Shinozaki Hyun, Guaigua, rapper Ryan, etc. all came to the scene to support Taiwanese fashion designers and Taipei Fashion Week, and nearly a thousand people attended the show.

INF has been always concerned about advocating Taiwanese culture for many years, and adheres the brand with the spirit of „taking culture as the foundation and using fashion as a carrier“.  The brand had been cooperated with ‘Line co’, local anime  ‘grandma and her ghost’, and took Taiwanese grocery store as scene to made into a fashion film, and invited Chen Shufang, the actress of the Golden Horse, as the heroine. This fashion film was not only showed on the official schedule of New York Fashion Week, but also awarded in 8 important international fashion film festivals.

On the day of the fashion show, it coincides with the day that Taiwan lift border restrictions to international travelers after three years of Covid epidemic. Looking forward to post-epidemic era, INF hopes to console past unpleasant through the integration of the traditional culture and fashion design under the title of《Kî-Tó》.  By doing this, INF hopes everyone to erase the haze and dust in mind, and relieve oneself from the epidemic and will look for bright side.

-Photos by @dyelogpr