Kwaidan Editions

Kwaidan Editions was founded in 2017 in London by Léa Dickely and Hung La as a contemporary luxury womenswear-and-menswear ready-to-wear label specifically focused on what they described as 'cinema-inflected fashion' — collections built explicitly around references to specific film aesthetics (David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Jacques Rivette, Wong Kar-wai, the 1970s Italian giallo tradition, the Japanese ghost-story genre that gave the brand its name). The brand's foundational thesis was specific: produce a fashion vocabulary that read as costume-design-quality cinematic clothing, with deliberate-narrative-references built into each season. The Kwaidan Editions vocabulary settled around several recurring elements: hand-printed silk shirts and dresses with cinematic-still-derived motifs, deconstructed leather and technical-fabric outerwear, the brand's iconic kabuki-derived hair-and-makeup looks at runway shows, and a colour palette that runs from saturated red and oxblood (cinematic-blood references) through muted Japanese-ink black, washed-charcoal, and pale-ivory. The brand has presented at London Fashion Week and Paris Fashion Week since 2018 and was nominated for the LVMH Prize semi-finalist position. The brand is independent and held by Dickely and La. Kwaidan Editions operates with no permanent retail of its own, distributing through SSENSE, MATCHES, Net-a-Porter, MR PORTER, Dover Street Market, GR8, Lane Crawford, and a small set of carefully chosen luxury specialty retailers globally. The brand has been one of the more conceptually rigorous post-2015 London debuts, with the explicit-cinematic-reference framework specifically anchoring the brand inside the contemporary art-and-fashion-cross-discipline conversation that has been continuously rewritten in the post-2020 era.