A pearl can sit on the surface of a dress, or it can become part of the way the dress is made. The difference is central to Camille Liu's work at PARISER. For the Autumn Winter 2025 collection To Those Who Wait, glass pearls were woven into knitwear rather than added after the fabric existed. The Sarabande Foundation's account of the collection describes jersey and knit shaped into sculptural forms in London. The ornament belongs to the textile's construction, giving each bright bead a place in the garment's stretch, weight and movement. What might have been a finishing touch becomes part of the cloth's life against a body.
Liu is a French-Chinese womenswear designer based in London. The British Fashion Council identifies her as PARISER's founder and describes a practice that brings chains, stones, pearls and rhinestones into knitwear. Her training includes knitwear at Central Saint Martins and couture work at Maison Lemarié, Lanvin, Alexander McQueen and Atelier Vernoux, according to the BFC. The clothes make that combination more than a résumé: they turn a material associated with softness and ease into a place for the concentrated handwork of jewelry and embellishment.
The central tension is tactile. A knitted fabric gives with the body; a bead or chain resists. Placing them together changes how the cloth hangs, how it catches light and perhaps how someone handles it when dressing. Liu's work does not erase either behavior. The knit can still feel close to skin, while the added weight makes its surface less ordinary. That is the premise behind PARISER's most distinctive pieces, and it explains why a designer trained in both knit and couture would choose this apparently difficult meeting point.
Pearls inside the structure
The Autumn Winter 2025 presentation was called To Those Who Wait. Sarabande described its glass pearls as woven directly into fabric. A pearl sewn onto finished cloth sits differently from one integrated as the textile is made. Liu's pearls participate in the surface from the start. Their positions are planned alongside the knit's tension and density, and their weight can affect the form the garment takes when worn.
The collection worked with jersey as well as knitwear. Both can follow a moving body, but they do not all produce the same silhouette. Liu's interest in sculpting them suggests an effort to control what is often celebrated for its softness. The Sarabande description calls the forms fluid and precise. That combination is visible in the material problem she has chosen: a soft ground must carry hard points of brightness without becoming rigid. The result can feel decorative, yet its decoration has been planned as part of a structural decision.
In a first-person interview with W, Liu said she wanted to explore knitwear beyond its familiar casual and functional role. She was interested in how it could adapt to individual bodies while encountering new materials and shapes. That is more demanding than simply making a sweater for evening. A knit that follows one person's form differently from another has to maintain its design identity through both. Beads and chains enter a fabric that is already changing as it is worn.
The way a pearl is incorporated also changes the wearer's attention. A necklace hangs separately and can be taken off. A pearl held in the knit arrives with the garment and remains in the same relationship to its surface. Liu brings a jewelry maker's concern with small, concentrated detail into an area of clothing that can cover a shoulder, chest or whole torso. The scale of the garment gives those points a field across which to gather and disperse. This is how the jewelry language becomes a textile language rather than a detachable accessory.
Sarabande specifies London making for To Those Who Wait. Earlier PARISER work involved a wider network. Liu told W in 2023 that artisans in Madagascar developed fabrics for her. These different working arrangements gave her more than one way to pursue the same experiments with material and handwork.
Denim that is not denim
Earlier PARISER work tested the eye in another way. The British Fashion Council profile describes frayed denim rendered in merino knit and unfinished-looking trims. At first, the language of wear appears familiar: fraying suggests repeated use, a garment softened or damaged by time. But the material beneath that appearance is knitted wool. Liu produces a sign of age through a newly made textile. The piece is neither an old pair of jeans nor a straightforward imitation of one. It sits between the visual memory of denim and the physical behavior of knitwear.
The distinction is important when her work is called “broken elegance.” That phrase, recorded by the BFC, need not mean careless finishing. A deliberately frayed edge requires a decision about where a textile ends, how its fibers remain secure and how much disorder the silhouette can bear. The evidence of making is visible at the edge. Liu's couture training enters through control, even when the final surface refuses to look perfectly sealed.
In W's account of her Autumn Winter 2023 collection, a black evening dress and a pair of trousers that looked like jeans were both made from knit fabrics. The substitution changes more than the label on a material swatch. Eveningwear is often imagined as structured by woven silk, satin or tailoring. Denim is imagined as sturdy and relatively unyielding. A knitted version can alter the pressure each piece places on a body and the way it responds to walking, sitting and dancing. Liu uses the expectation attached to a recognizable garment to reveal what the fabric can do differently.
Chains, stones and rhinestones entered the same collection vocabulary. W reported that Liu fixed jewelry-like elements to the garments to take knitwear toward evening. The harder materials can pull the eye to a shoulder or neckline, while the softer ground keeps contact with the wearer. The design challenge lies in their balance. Too much hardware could turn a supple textile into a display stand; too little would leave the claimed clash of materials barely visible. PARISER's attraction lies in making that balance felt, sometimes through an apparently worn edge and sometimes through points of shine.
Liu described the 2023 collection as drawing on several archetypes in her own wardrobe. That starting point keeps the work within recognizable categories even as its surfaces change. A dress is still a dress. Trousers remain trousers. The break happens through material: knit takes on denim's appearance, or a soft evening piece is given the brightness and weight of stones. PARISER does not require the wearer to accept an entirely unfamiliar object before noticing the experiment. It begins with garments whose uses are already understood.
What Vestige leaves behind
In September 2023, PARISER presented Vestige at the Sarabande Foundation. The event centered on knit, beading and crochet and accompanied a film on London Fashion Week's digital schedule. Its title suggested the trace an object leaves when it has been held onto. Sarabande framed the collection around precious objects passed through time; the BFC page now preserves a gallery of its looks. The garments placed small acts of handwork beside the more continuous, repeated labor of knitting.
The idea of a vestige suits Liu's interest in apparent wear. Frayed edges and unfinished-looking trims evoke a prior life, while jewels and beads suggest something preserved. The two impulses pull against one another. A worn surface can be dismissed as old; a pearl can be treated as too valuable to touch. Liu brings both into an object meant to be worn now. The wearer inherits no literal family heirloom through a newly made PARISER piece, but the garment can ask for the kind of attention often given to one.
The accompanying film mattered as another way to see these surfaces. Knit and beading have a scale that a distant runway view can flatten. The Sarabande announcement promised a closer view of the processes behind the collection, while the physical event let visitors encounter the pieces in the room. Neither image nor display can replace the garment's contact with skin. Together, they gave the work several distances from which to be considered: a whole look, an edge, a bead held in the fabric.
The following collection, No Fear of Time, continued the concern with preciousness. Sarabande's account says the new pieces were made in Liu's studio there and connected jewelry vocabulary with knitwear. Its concept grew directly from Vestige's attention to objects kept over years. The collection title reverses a familiar anxiety about fashion aging out of relevance. A garment's changing life with a wearer becomes part of its value, at least as a design ambition.
Sarabande also identified a Caviar Bag and Pearl Tank among PARISER pieces offered through its concept store. Those names point to how readily Liu's vocabulary can move between the garment and the object carried with it. Their construction is not described in the available collection account. Their presence does show that the label's investigation was not confined to sweaters or dresses. The relationship between textile and ornament could be tested at the scale of a tank top or a bag, with a different pattern of touch for each.
The question of longevity is easy to state and hard to achieve. A garment cannot be made durable by calling it precious. Its edge, stitch, ornament and care demands must survive use, and the wearer must want to return to it. Liu's attention to integrating embellishment rather than simply placing it on a finished surface is one concrete response. When the hard and soft parts are considered together from the beginning, the piece has a clearer chance of working as a single object. That is a design strategy, not proof that every garment will last indefinitely.
The hand beneath the surface
Liu has described the influence of her mother, a pattern cutter. In W's interview, she remembered being around cutting tables, scraps of fabric and the ordinary labor of making clothes while she was young. The story gives a practical starting point to a career sometimes presented through prestigious houses. She knew fabric as something handled and cut before she knew it as a finished runway image.
Her later work at Maison Lemarié, a Chanel specialist in feathers and flowers, placed her near artisans whose expertise rests in repeated, precise actions. She spoke to W about the depth of that knowledge and the importance of workshops that keep it alive. PARISER does not reproduce a Lemarié flower on a knit as a badge of borrowed prestige. The connection is in the intensity of making: small elements worked carefully enough that they change an object's character.
The BFC biography lists further training at Lanvin, Alexander McQueen and Atelier Vernoux. A list of employers can make a designer's trajectory appear inevitable; the clothes show a more specific set of choices. Liu chose a medium that stretches and adapts, then brought into it techniques associated with couture decoration. She did not abandon knitwear for the apparent freedom of a gown. She made knit the place where an evening garment could begin.
In an earlier first-person interview, she spoke of discipline as a source of freedom in design and of wanting her work to have a quieter voice in an industry that often asks young designers to shout. That preference helps explain the persistence of exact surface decisions in PARISER. A pearl integrated into knit can be seen at a distance as a glint. Up close, it reveals where the maker chose to place weight, light and a small interruption of texture. The garment does not need an oversized silhouette to register its ambition.
Liu's French and Chinese background is documented by the BFC and Sarabande. Her design language takes shape in PARISER's experiments with knit, jewelry, denim and eveningwear. Those references are chosen, tested and altered. They do not emerge automatically from a biographical category.
To Those Who Wait brought the inquiry into a more concentrated form. Pearls entered the textile rather than sitting on its surface. Jersey and knit were shaped to keep both fluidity and structure. The title suggests patience, but its most persuasive expression is in the work itself: the planning needed to make a small hard object live within a fabric that moves. That work is what the wearer feels, even when the pearl is barely visible.
The result is a wardrobe in which ornament is not a separate final step. Frayed merino can recall denim without behaving like it. A knitted evening dress can hold the shimmer of jewelry and still follow a body. A pearl can be part of a textile's construction, with its brightness inseparable from the stitch that carries it. Liu's designs give familiar garments another life by changing the relationship between their surfaces and their use. The memory they keep is made in the material.