Style Points is a weekly column about how fashion intersects with the wider world.
It’s a good thing Christopher Kane checks his DMs. This spring, the designer got a message from one of his contacts offering to connect him with Han Chong, the designer of Self-Portrait. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, absolutely.’” Kane says. The two had never “really properly met,” he tells me. “It’s always been at a dinner or a cocktail party. A hi-bye.” They promptly got lunch and, Kane reports, “just hit it off. He’s very mischievous, like me. We can have a laugh and talk absolute baloney.”
The lunch date led to something more than just a matching of wits, though. Chong appointed Kane the first guest designer for Self-Portrait’s new residency program. Kane had been off the fashion scene for a bit, having closed up shop last summer. He was taking a break from fashion to focus on his other passion: painting. “I don’t really see anything as a failure, but it was definitely a big transition for me,” he says. Amid the challenges of the London fashion industry right now, he says, “Han has really been a beacon of light.” (Chong extended help to another one of the city’s talents, Roland Mouret, acquiring the designer’s label after he went into administration in 2021.)
A look from the collection.
Kane and Chong’s codes are more similar than you might think. (Among the traits their lines share: “Hyper-feminine, empowering women, lace, color.”) For this capsule, Kane drew on his debut collection for spring 2007. That show was full of bright, lace-accented, seductive clothing back when, as he puts it, “people were terrified of neon…I thought, [if] everyone’s in a sea of beige, then I want to be in a sea of something else.”
Kane insists that he is not the nostalgic type. “I always look forward. But it was cathartic to look back and be inspired by those amazing pieces.” (He calls the looks in this collection the “little brothers and sisters” of their 2007 equivalents.) Still, returning to a design studio, “I was very nervous, I’m not going to lie. I’ve never worked in a studio with someone else, but I was nervous for five minutes and then it was just laughing, joking, and everyone was so nice.”
“Someone said the other week, ‘It’s such a shame I don’t see you on the runway.’ And I was like, ‘Well, I see my work all over the runway…in other people’s collections,’” he says with a sly smile. It’s certainly true that Kane’s spirit of colorful, eccentric, smartly sexed-up dressing has never felt more on point—just look at what was on offer for spring 2025. “I think it’s a time, culturally, when things are really low frequency. People want to be joyful and feel great,” he says. (No surprise from the man who brought us More Joy.)
“When I think of those designers that I looked up to as a student, it was the Helmut Langs, the Gianni Versaces, the Rei Kawakubos, the Mrs. Pradas. It wasn’t just fashion, it was historic, because they were doing sex and femininity in completely different ways. For me, that’s fashion,” he says. “And I think we crave that more than ever.”
Véronique Hyland is ELLE’s Fashion Features Director and the author of the book Dress Code, which was selected as one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year. Her writing has previously appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, W, New York magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and Condé Nast Traveler.
