The staple on a SHEK LEUNG garment is not what it first appears to be. It looks as if it is holding the cloth together, but the studio describes it as a handmade detail that sits over a snap closure. The garment closes by one mechanism and tells a different story with another. That slight separation between appearance and function is central to Shek Yen Samson Leung's work. The London and Hong Kong designer puts frames, tabs, slits and textured surfaces around familiar clothes, then asks how much a wearer is willing to show. His pieces are made to be looked at closely, yet their most interesting quality is the way a small construction choice can change a person's sense of the whole garment.
Leung was born in Taiwan and raised in Hong Kong. He completed BA and MA fashion studies at Central Saint Martins and established the SHEK LEUNG label after graduating. The British Fashion Council describes a practice concerned with textile development, garment construction and what the house calls quiet masculinity. Its own site speaks of family ties to the film industry. This background is not a reason to call every coat cinematic. It is more useful as a way into his handling of surfaces: grain, shadow and a carefully placed detail can make an ordinary garment seem to hold another image within it.
His collection titles describe changing states of mind. Gentle Living gives silence and vulnerability a place in menswear. A Breath of Fresh Noise pushes texture and visual disturbance into the cloth. Goodbye / Goodnight turns to grief and protection, while Poetic Reverie makes a more playful proposal for the body. The sequence is not a neat story of improvement. Leung returns to a few stubborn questions in new forms: what a seam can do, where a body is revealed, and how decoration might behave like part of a fastening, a boundary or a frame.
Building a surface from stitches
In the debut Gentle Living collection, the studio explains that it developed a fabric from cover-stitch work. Cover stitching is commonly used as a finishing method. Leung spreads the technique across a textile surface, arranging thread colors to recall the grain of his own film imagery. The change in scale matters. A method usually noticed at a hem becomes the substance of a whole cloth. The eye no longer follows the stitch only to verify that a garment is finished; it moves across repeated colored lines as it would across a picture.
The house says it altered the order of colors and the thread choices in this self-made material. Those are modest sounding decisions, but each affects the rhythm of what the viewer sees. A speckled field may look spontaneous from a distance. Up close, repetition exposes the labor that placed each line. Leung's use of film grain is therefore more than an analogy attached after the clothes are made. A grainy image is composed of small units; his textile also gains its larger tone from the accumulation of small marks. The body wearing it gives that field a shape film does not have.
The same collection page shows how he uses handmade staples over snap closures. A snap is meant to connect two parts quickly and often invisibly. The staple-like detail makes the connection conspicuous. It can look provisional, as though someone has quickly repaired or pinned the piece, yet it is deliberately fabricated. Leung draws attention to the point where clothing comes together. Rather than hiding the garment's engineering, he gives its closure a visual role. The wearer participates each time the snap opens or shuts.
He also develops framed knitted socks. A sock usually disappears beneath trousers and shoes, but a frame can make its edge into an object of attention. In the Gentle Living details, the framed sock sits beside hand-painted landscape surfaces and an airbrushed gradient that the studio calls an aura. The methods produce different kinds of image. Paint lies on a surface, an airbrushed gradient changes its tone, and a knitted frame changes its outline. Together they show Leung testing whether emotion can be carried by a textile's color, its texture or its physical boundary.
The quiet masculinity of Gentle Living becomes convincing where these decisions touch familiar garments. A snap can be hidden or made visible. A sock can be a functional layer or a framed shape. Fabric can be chosen for its existing pattern or developed through an unusual use of stitching. None of those choices makes a loud declaration by itself. Their accumulation allows a wearer to appear composed while the clothing contains small signs of uncertainty and experiment. The collection's softness is constructed rather than assumed.
The useful noise
The next act, A Breath of Fresh Noise, takes the handmade cover-stitch surface further. Leung describes working with tonal thread arrangements to produce a speckled texture. The collection also uses translucent voile and detachable asymmetric drapes. These details change the relation between a body and its covering. Voile lets a person be partly seen through the garment. A detachable drape can be kept or removed, altering both the outline and how much the wearer chooses to reveal. The clothes make exposure adjustable rather than treating it as a fixed quality of the design.
The studio's SS23 account links its translucent layers to memories of workmen wearing undergarments in public for comfort. That reference is specific and practical. A body responds to heat or labor before it responds to a fashion rule about what should stay hidden. Leung turns the tension between utility and convention into cloth that is neither fully opaque nor simply bare. The sheer layer becomes a decision about the threshold between private and public dress.
The asymmetric drapes add another threshold. A fixed drape can make a silhouette look complete from the moment it is hung on a rail. A removable one admits that the wearer may change the garment's composition. The studio says these pieces were designed with wearability in mind. Their importance lies in the choice they give: volume or a leaner line, a more protected torso or a more visible one. The body is not merely the support on which an image of vulnerability is displayed. It can take an active role in arranging that image.
Leung's signature three-dimensional socks return in this collection with twisted, frayed edges. The sock is a particularly direct place to consider movement because it sits around a foot and ankle all day. A sculptural edge will be seen differently while standing, walking or sitting. The studio's repeated attention to socks also challenges the hierarchy of a fashion look. A small garment at the edge of the body can carry as much design thought as a coat, even if it does not command the first glance.
The title A Breath of Fresh Noise captures the collision of two sensations. Breath suggests a body and an interval; noise suggests disturbance. Leung makes that collision in textile terms. Cover-stitch marks gather into visual grain; sheer voile lets the body remain present; detachable elements interrupt the idea that the designer has fixed a single final silhouette. The collection is at its strongest when its mood becomes a practical question about what attaches to a garment and what can move away from it.
A coat with a changeable edge
For Autumn Winter 2023, Goodbye / Goodnight turns to firmer textures and a darker emotional register. Leung describes translucent cotton voile alongside stronger structures, slits, hand-stapled shirts and self-made cover-stitch fabrics. The contrast between protective and revealing elements remains, but it feels less airy than in the preceding season. The coat becomes a place to test how a clear outline can hold uncertainty, while the shirt gives a fastening the look of a visible repair.
The Trapezium Framed Coat is described as using pin tucks to outline the body. A pin tuck draws a narrow fold into cloth and secures it with stitching. Repeating those folds can make a coat's surface seem to draw lines around its wearer. Leung's title calls the result a frame, an object normally placed around a picture rather than worn. Here the frame belongs to the garment's cut and surface. It can make the wearer more sharply legible without enclosing the body in a hard shell.
The coat also clarifies his interest in masculinity. A conventional overcoat can signal authority through a broad shoulder, a heavy cloth or a clean line. Leung keeps the public garment but uses pin tucks and a changed outline to make its strength less automatic. The frame may support the person within it, yet it also asks the viewer to notice how support has been made. A man wearing the coat does not have to perform certainty for every moment. The clothing can contain an uneven, thoughtful surface while still giving him a recognizable outer layer.
In the same season, he says speciality shirts were hand-stapled and that cover-stitch methods were extended into original fabrics. Grain imagery appears through digital printing and puff binding on knitwear. Printed marks and raised marks behave differently under light and touch. A printed area can carry a drawn image while puff binding can make a surface physically uneven. Leung works between them to give the impression of grain more than one form. What began as a connection between film and thread grows into a broader study of how a picture can acquire texture.
The house also names gloves, socks and scarves with twisted frames, plus beaded bags whose larger-scale grains echo marks in the clothing. Accessories can be treated as afterthoughts when a collection is discussed through its largest silhouettes. Here they carry the same formal questions as the coat and shirt: where does an object end, and how visible should its edge be? A framed glove touches the hand, a scarf moves with the neck, and a bag is held away from the body. The grain or frame changes meaning as it travels among those positions.
A playful room for the body
In Spring Summer 2024's Poetic Reverie, Leung opens the work toward a lighter and more mischievous wardrobe. The studio names 15 textured looks, including low-rise askew shorts, homeware-inspired puff-bound trousers and a wool suit with pleated tiles that change appearance when unclasped. The word homeware matters because it moves the reference from formal dress toward familiar domestic surfaces. A textile can recall the comfort of a room without becoming a costume of furniture. Leung uses that association to test how much softness a tailored wardrobe can hold.
The wool suit's pleated tiles are a precise example of choice built into a garment. Clasped, the tiles present one surface; released, they reveal another. A viewer sees a formal suit, then discovers that part of its appearance can be rearranged. The device gives the wearer a hand in the composition. It also makes the suit's apparent composure conditional. One gesture changes the relation between the outer face and what lies beneath it.
The wrap cotton shirt has a trompe l'oeil cuff placket and allows a glimpse of the chest. Trompe l'oeil invites the eye to treat a detail as something it is not. Leung pairs that visual trick with an actual opening. The shirt can look familiar enough to place in a wardrobe, while its wrap and exposed area change the body's relation to that familiar form. It is another variation on the snap and the frame: what seems to be one kind of closure becomes a more complicated encounter between image, structure and skin.
The season also introduces denim, plaited patterns in his handmade cover-stitch fabrics, asymmetrical grain-textured knitwear, roof-like frames and a raw-edged, two-tone blazer. These are not simply more ornaments added to an expanding range. Each tries a different way of making the boundary of a garment active. A raw edge refuses a perfectly sealed finish; a roof-like frame gives the upper body an architectural line; an asymmetrical neckline shifts the center of a knit. Leung's recurring idea survives because it can move between techniques.
His official account of Poetic Reverie credits Mary Chan for handmade staple details, Elaine Lip for knitwear and Doyeon Ji for shoes. Leung directs the vocabulary of the house, while specialist collaborators help bring its different objects into being. A staple, a knit or a shoe carries the collection's vocabulary through different kinds of making.
Leung's site offers collections, projects, shop and bespoke work; the British Fashion Council biography also identifies consulting activity. The collections from Gentle Living through Poetic Reverie show a coherent practice that keeps returning to the body through real garment questions. A staple can sit over a snap, a tile can unclasp, a drape can detach. These are not metaphors painted on after the clothes are finished. They are points where a wearer acts.
That is the force of Leung's quieter approach. A frame is often imagined as something rigid, fitted around an image to keep it still. His frames can be knitted, tucked, twisted or made to move with a person. They may sharpen a coat's silhouette or draw attention to a sock near the floor. They give the wearer an outline without demanding that the person inside it feel complete or unchanging. From a close stitch to the shape of a whole look, Leung makes the boundary of a garment a place where vulnerability and control can meet.