The thread in Dean Lap Chan's embroidery is allowed to leave the edge of the cloth. It can float, fray and extend instead of lying tight within a neat stitched image. That small act of release gives the London designer a language for something difficult to hold: the memory of a city as it changes. In his Spring Summer 2027 collection Faded Glory, Hong Kong's summers of the 1980s and 1990s appear through stripes that seem to have softened with time, retro tailoring and his own loose embroidery. The clothes do not offer a literal reconstruction of a decade. They ask what happens when an image one remembers is worked into a garment that will move into someone else's future.
Chan is a Hong Kong-born, London-based designer who completed an MA in fashion at Central Saint Martins with a PORTS 1961 scholarship. His namesake label has appeared in London Fashion Week's DiscoveryLAB program. The official Faded Glory release describes a 13-look womenswear collection. It identifies faded stripes, retro tailoring, period silhouettes and a technique it calls Loosing-Embroidery. In a first-person conversation, Chan calls the method Loose-Embroidery and explains that threads are not bound into tight, uniform stitches. The two spellings point toward the same central idea: looseness is made, not merely left to chance.
Embroidery normally promises control. A maker chooses a path, fixes a thread and fills an area until a design can be read. Chan keeps the maker's hand but refuses the expectation that every strand must finish cleanly inside a border. The result turns surface decoration into an argument about a garment's limits. A loose thread can protrude beyond a jacket, top or dress; the decorated surface may continue in the air around it. Because thread is physical, the effect must be considered alongside wear. A person walking, sitting and brushing past others gives the embroidery conditions a photograph cannot supply.
A memory with an unfinished edge
In the interview about Faded Glory, Chan remembers crowded color combinations in Hong Kong's summer streets and the clothes worn by women negotiating both polished appearance and heat. His recollection gives the collection a social scale. The clothes do not refer only to a skyline or an abstract nostalgia for an era. They refer to bodies adjusting to climate and to public expectations of how to look. The designer's answer is not a historical costume. He turns those remembered tensions into choices of color, cut and textile surface.
The release speaks of faded stripes in dynamic color combinations. A stripe is a strict organizing device: it repeats at intervals and makes the direction of the fabric immediately visible. To fade it is to weaken that certainty. Color can remain recognizable while its edge appears less emphatic. Chan sets that softening beside tailoring, another practice associated with precision. The fabric seems to remember a pattern that the cut continues to hold. The tension lets the collection speak about time without turning the clothes into damaged props.
His loose embroidery pursues a related change at a smaller scale. Chan says threads in Faded Glory can float, fray and reach past the cloth, making imagery that seems to dissolve when viewed closely. The action reverses a common relationship between distance and detail. From afar, embroidery might read as an image; nearby, it breaks into individual fibers, knots and ends. The closer a person gets, the more clearly the image's making becomes visible. The garment does not give up its design at close range. It gives up the illusion that design is a perfectly sealed surface.
Chan describes a deliberate technique in which some strands are secured while others are permitted to extend. Floating threads are part of how he translates recollection. The cloth holds enough of the embroidery for an image to exist, while the exposed ends make the image appear capable of changing. A maker has to control the beginning of each line in order to let its ending remain open. The freedom of the thread therefore depends on decisions about placement and restraint.
The collection's 13 looks are womenswear, according to the London Fashion Week press release. In the official image numbered 02, a broad, dark jacket-like form has wide sleeves, a front closure and two low pockets with visible zippers. An orange fish-shaped motif sits high on one side. The little figure interrupts the garment's large dark field. Its vivid color makes the upper body a focal point, while the pockets and closure keep the object recognizably close to outerwear. The memory work here is not confined to a dissolving overall surface. It can arrive as a small image set against a garment meant to open and close.
The official image numbered 05 gives the viewer a different scale. A sleeveless, dark, semi-transparent dress falls away from a broad neckline, with pale pink, white and green flower-like shapes distributed across its front. The silhouette is comparatively simple and open; the scattered forms carry its surface activity. A ruffled neck piece frames the face without enclosing the arms. Beside the dark outerwear image, the dress shows how the collection can move from a single high-contrast motif to many smaller points of color. It also gives Chan's recollection of crowded summer palettes a garment-sized field.
The cut from another city
Chan describes Hong Kong as a source of contrast and narrative rhythm, and London as a place where he found conceptual freedom and a more architectural approach to cut. The first-person interview is his own account of that exchange. It avoids treating either city as a decorative motif. The practical question for a designer working between them is how an idea becomes a pattern piece. A recollected color can enter cloth through a stripe; the desire for a precise outline must be resolved in the cut, fit and construction of a garment.
The British Fashion Council biography identifies textile innovation, retro sensibility and garment construction as connected parts of his practice. It also names the Central Saint Martins MA and scholarship. In the official image numbered 07, a boxy sleeveless high-neck top carries broad horizontal bands of white and brown above loose trousers washed with pink, purple and green. The top gives the eye a firm rhythm, while the softer color field below it resists that order. The pairing makes contrast a matter of whole garments, not only an effect stitched onto one surface.
Retro tailoring can become a costume if every line is copied from a period image. Chan's release calls up period silhouettes, but the embroidery makes the past unstable rather than complete. The wearer is not dressed as someone who lived in a remembered photograph. She wears a new garment in which the photograph's certainty has been interrupted. Fading stripes and projecting threads are changes made now, for a body moving now. That is how the collection keeps nostalgia from becoming an instruction to return.
The designer has said he hopes his garments can become heirlooms. In the interview, that hope belongs to a future for the label, not a claim about the proven longevity of its current pieces. An heirloom accrues uses and owners after it leaves the maker. Loose embroidery might seem to resist the idea of preservation, but it also gives the wearer an especially visible sense of making. The thread records a decision about where the surface ends. As the garment enters ordinary life, that decision will meet touch, storage and care.
Traces before glory
Faded Glory follows a different project about change. Chan's Autumn Winter 2026 collection Lasting Traces comprised 17 looks across womenswear and menswear. The London Fashion Week description connects the collection to transitions in youth: leaving home, entering a relationship and pursuing a distant calling. These are broad situations, but the title narrows the question. What remains on a person when a place or life arrangement changes? A trace can be a mark left behind or a line carried forward. Chan's next collection takes that concern into the fading of a city remembered through color and textile.
The shift from 17 mixed-gender looks to 13 womenswear looks does not establish a permanent change in the house. It does show two different scales on which Chan developed his ideas in consecutive seasons. Lasting Traces was framed around personal transitions within Hong Kong's culture and society; Faded Glory looks back at a particular period and draws on remembered summer streets. One starts with the move toward an unknown future, the other with what remains of a known past. Both make the passage of time central to clothing that is worn in the present.
The London Fashion Week page also lists Halcyon Days among his collections. Lasting Traces and Faded Glory develop an interest in time from different directions: one follows an imagined departure, the other studies a place recalled. Across these seasons, textile experimentation gives a trace or a fading image a surface on which to live.
The three images make it harder to reduce Chan's work to one surface trick. The dark outerwear form lets one orange figure command attention; the transparent dress scatters many flower-like shapes across the body; the sleeveless striped top sets a repeated band against softly mottled trousers. Each garment decides where color is concentrated and where it can spread. His loose embroidery is one method among several for changing the certainty of an image. Cut, scale and the meeting of two pieces of clothing are just as active in the collection.
Looking closely, then stepping back
The campaign for Faded Glory was photographed by Fei Sun in a historic British house and garden, with a short film by Jess Wishart, according to the official credits. The setting places a Hong Kong memory inside another place's architecture and landscape. It gives the garments an atmosphere, but the collection does not depend on that location for its entire meaning. A stripe remains faded outside the photograph; a loose thread still crosses the edge of cloth. The credited collaborators helped make the campaign's image, while the designer's textile decisions continue when the clothes leave the image.
That movement beyond a controlled frame is why loose embroidery is a fertile signature. A campaign photograph can arrest a strand at a graceful angle. On a moving wearer the strand may lift, fall or brush against another surface. Its exact behavior will depend on the garment and the body. Chan has built that possibility into how he describes the technique. The embroidery is not simply a picture placed upon clothing. It is a set of threads with their own small freedom, carried by an object that has to be put on and taken off.
On the sleeveless top in image 07, horizontal bands give the upper body a clear frame even as the trousers below it shift among several pastel colors. In image 02, by contrast, the dark jacket-like garment makes the orange figure unusually easy to find. Color becomes a matter of spacing: the eye can be pulled toward one motif or allowed to travel among many areas. The choices change how long a viewer spends with the clothes. They also show why a collection about fading need not be uniformly pale or subdued.
Chan's biography connects Hong Kong and London, but his collections do not require the viewer to choose one city as the source of authenticity and the other as a place of polish. He names different things learned in each. The current work makes those lessons interact: a recollected urban palette in cloth, a precise cut developed through fashion training, and stitches permitted to travel beyond their expected boundary. The result is a garment made in the present from a memory whose edges remain open. It belongs to Chan's experience without claiming to contain all of Hong Kong.
At its most persuasive, Faded Glory holds two versions of time at once. Tailoring fixes proportions for the moment of wearing; loose embroidery suggests that an image can change as it is handled and seen. Stripes repeat, then fade. The clothes neither preserve a past intact nor discard it as a mere mood. They make memory a problem of textile and cut, where the designer must decide what to secure and what to let go. Chan's thread can cross the edge of the fabric, but it begins with the exacting work of knowing where that edge is.