YUHAN WANG SS27 - SWEET NIGHTMARE

What exactly does a woman wear when nobody is watching?

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For Yuhan Wang, the answer might be three pairs of underwear at once. Or lace stockings with boxer shorts. Perhaps a striped polo thrown over lingerie, jewellery half-removed and caught in your clothes, or a tiny tea set strapped around your waist. For Spring/Summer 2027, Wang takes us somewhere fashion isn't usually invited: the bedroom with the door firmly closed.

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Titled Sweet Nightmare, the collection explores the different selves that emerge when performance gives way to privacy. The version of ourselves presented to the outside world isn't necessarily the same one wandering around the bedroom at midnight. Here, getting dressed and getting undressed become almost indistinguishable, and the rules governing what should be worn with what quietly disappear.

That freedom produces some wonderfully strange combinations. Delicate lace and silk satin meet striped polos, checks, cotton and sports jersey. Underwear becomes outerwear without necessarily becoming overtly sexual. Briefs are layered together until they form an entirely new garment, while a lingerie silhouette reconstructed in polo fabric turns something sporty into something unexpectedly intimate.

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And then things get weird.

A powder-blue baby-doll dress balloons dramatically from the hips, distorting a familiar feminine silhouette into something almost surreal. Lace crawls across the body like a second skin. Clothes brushes become accessories. Powder compacts and miniature mirrors escape the dressing table, while necklaces appear tangled into clothing as though their wearer became distracted halfway through taking them off. At one point, tiny floral teacups and saucers circle the waist. It shouldn't really make sense — which is precisely why it does within Wang's dream.

The sweetness of the collection is equally deceptive. Pastel pinks and blues, cherries, florals, cats, ruffles and lace create an almost sugary femininity against the pink-draped runway, but something consistently feels slightly off. Wang draws upon the domestic paranoia of Rosemary's Baby, the fractured identity of Eyes Without a Face and the heightened unease of Suspiria, allowing prettiness and discomfort to occupy the same space.

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Yet beneath all the surreal details is something surprisingly intimate. The bedroom is one of the few places where clothes don't always need an audience. You can try something on, take something else off, wear the wrong pieces together or sit around in your underwear having tea. Nobody has to understand it.

And maybe nobody has to understand the woman doing it either. Sweet Nightmare doesn't try to reconcile the obedient woman with the rebellious one, the romantic with the strange, or the version seen outside with the one who exists behind a closed door. Yuhan Wang simply lets them all get dressed together.