Wuhan Wang F/W '21

If the costume designer of Bridgerton ever needs an extra pair of hands, she could find an ideal hire in Yuhan Wang. Not that she’s a costume designer per se, but the pastel-hued, floral, romantic vision the Central Saint Martins M.A. alum has been working since 2018 would sit perfectly in a Regency drawing room—Wang even shot her last look book in a Georgian house. Hers is a world inhabited by girls in frilly, ruched, micro-flowered dresses in Directoire shoes—a place with a whimsical aura reminiscent of a ladylike 18th-century watercolor.

So it fits the picture to discover that Wang actually did wend her way to being a fashion designer via her time as an art student at home in China. “I paint landscapes,” she said on a Zoom call from her studio in London. Lockdown had made her recall everything she knows about the cultural backdrop of the history of Tang Dynasty landscapes. “The painters created these fantasy-nature landscapes for noblemen to escape from the ordinary world. It was always done by men for men. So this season I wanted to make my own, for women and girls.”

Her watercolors of sika deer and stylized pine trees became the beginnings of charming prints and embroideries; these form the vignettes she photographed on little groups of mothers, daughters, and girlfriends for fall. This season there are her signature, sinuously draped dresses, but also, among the lace and chintzy florals, more tailoring in the shape of flared trouser suits and some waisted coats and peplum jackets trimmed with raw-edge fringe. Pretty things designed for a time when perhaps we won’t be spending all our lives escaping into the latest episodes of Bridgerton. Much as we love it.