CLARA CHU

Accessories Focus AW 2026

We were ready with questions.

Questions about mops and memory.About rubber tubing turned into ritual.About why a dustpan, of all things, deserves a second life as something carried with intention.

Clara Chu was not present that evening — but her work was. And sometimes, that is enough.

At her latest presentation during London Fashion Week, domestic objects resurfaced under new light. Familiar materials — hot water bottles, plastic fragments, industrial remnants — appeared not as waste, but as propositions. As accessories. As conversation starters placed inside one of fashion’s most polished ecosystems.

There is something quietly subversive about carrying the architecture of the everyday into a space built on spectacle.

Through the lens of Emily Georg, the evening unfolded in gestures and textures — hands tracing plastic curves, light catching translucent surfaces, silhouettes moving between utility and sculpture. The images do not document product; they capture atmosphere. A shift in perception.

What happens when the overlooked becomes the focal point?When objects coded as disposable are reintroduced as desirable?When sustainability feels less like instruction and more like curiosity?

The questions remain — and perhaps that is the point.

Because we wanted to ask Clara what the first object was.

The first mop. The first dustpan. The first length of rubber tubing that stopped being waste and started becoming possibility.

Her work begins exactly there — in the overlooked. In the domestic. In the things we handle daily without ever truly seeing them. These objects resurfaced not as debris, but as accessories: sculptural bags formed from hot water bottles, industrial fragments reshaped into something between artefact and pop relic.

There is a tension in her practice that feels deliberate. Mundanity versus vitality. The recognisable versus the reimagined. When does an object remain visibly itself — and when is it allowed to dissolve into abstraction? Part of the power lies in recognition. The moment you realise you know this material. That it once lived under a sink, inside a cupboard, within the quiet architecture of routine.

Her work merges mass production with hand intervention. Factory-made plastic reshaped through careful craftsmanship. It reads almost like a quiet critique of the fashion system — but never aggressively so. Instead, it feels like a proposal. A suggestion that value is not inherent in rarity or price, but in attention and transformation.

Waste is central to the narrative surrounding her brand, yet the pieces do not moralise. They feel playful. Colourful. Even joyful. How do you maintain desire when working with materials culturally coded as disposable? How do you keep education from becoming instruction?

Perhaps the answer lies in humour. In the charm of a bag that still hints at its previous life. In the slight rebellion of carrying a symbol of domestic labour into fashion week’s polished theatre.

Placed within London’s luxury landscape, the accessories do not shout. They linger. Are they disruption? Invitation? Reminder?

Even in her absence, the work spoke.

It spoke about circularity without austerity. About sustainability without self-righteousness. About collaboration — many pieces made to order, sometimes co-designed — shifting the wearer from consumer to participant.

At LUMEN, we are less interested in answers than in designers who create better questions. Clara Chu’s practice does exactly that. It asks us to reconsider the objects we touch every day — and whether transformation begins not with invention, but with recognition.

And perhaps that is where her quiet radicalism lives.