Ray Chu FINDS Quiet Strength In Taiwan’s Sambucus Flower
For Spring/Summer 2027, the Taiwanese gender-fluid label built its London Fashion Week presentation around a small white blossom that only shows its strength when it grows in clusters. Gabriel Winter reports on the collection and asks the designer a few questions.
Ray Chu has spent ten years building a label in which sharp tailoring and open sensuality share the same rail, and Fans Only Club, the Spring/Summer 2027 collection he presented at Bourne & Hollingsworth during London Fashion Week, reads as the moment that long experiment has started to settle into something he can describe with real certainty.
The collection began with the Taiwanese Sambucus flower, known locally as 冇骨消, whose tiny white blossoms gather into soft, cloud-like clusters that Chu found himself returning to as a way of thinking about identity and community. “Individually they feel very delicate, but together they have a completely different strength,” he told Asthetik, and that idea of a softness that holds its own runs through every look in the presentation.
Chu was careful to keep the flower at a distance from the clothes themselves, explaining that “it was less about literally recreating a flower and more about capturing that feeling,” so the botanical reference arrives in fragments, broken up across new prints, clustered embellishment and the controlled shimmer of fabrics that catch the light without shouting about it. The new Sambucus print abstracts the blossom into something closer to a contemporary botanical, while Taiwan Banana Club, carried over from the Pre-Spring 2027 capsule, brings a bolder and more nostalgic colour story drawn from Taiwanese culture.
Underneath both sits a material story that Chu treats as seriously as the silhouettes, with lightweight mint-fibre shirting and a quick-drying Icy Grass jersey bringing a technical comfort to pieces that are meant to be worn well beyond a summer evening.
Selected looks were finished with Swarovski ReCreated™ Crystals, made from the breakage left over from crystal manufacturing and set in small formations that recall water droplets and the clustering of the flower, which gives the embellishment a circular logic that suits the brand’s wider approach to responsible fabrics.
Japanese artist MOMOJIRI WORKS contributed a series of sculptural wire accessories and harnesses made specifically for the presentation, translating the same flower through her own twisting, playful linework, and the Hong Kong sexual-wellness brand Hello Nancy sponsored the show, with pieces from its tennis-inspired collection worked into selected looks in a way that sits comfortably alongside the fruit and humour of the Banana Club universe.
Choosing a presentation over a runway was a deliberate decision on Chu’s part, because, as he put it, “a presentation gives people more time with the clothes,” and the detail in this collection rewards that kind of slow looking. The models moved, posed and interacted across the space rather than holding still, which Chu felt made the whole thing “feel more alive” and brought the audience much closer to the characters wearing the clothes.
What stands out most is how settled Chu sounds about where the label is heading. “I feel much more certain about what RAY CHU is now,” he said, describing a process of deciding what needs to stay and what can be stripped away, with his attention now on how experimental pieces, tailoring and everyday clothing “can exist together as one complete wardrobe rather than as separate ideas.” Having already appeared on the official London Fashion Week schedule and drawn media coverage, RAY CHU presents its SS27 collection in clearer terms than before, while still leaving plenty of room for the label to enjoy itself.
