Sean Suen: Tea Horse Road’n’roll

After 10 days of neo-classical tailoring in Florence, Milan and Paris, revamped workwear and so-called ‘smart luxury’, finally a proper collection of great fresh menswear from Sean Suen.

A breeze of fresh attitude and dressing inspired by the legendary Tea Horse Road across the Himalayas, the first great path of global commerce from China, through Tibet to India. Created by Sean Suen, a Chinese designer with singular vision, punchy detailing and oodles of technique.
 
Suen’s model merchants paraded their stuff inside the Cité de l’Architecture overlooking the Seine, and the architecture of the clothes was a thing to behold.

East met West with hybrid duffle/Everest parkas; Coney Island jerkin finished with high priest sleeves; Montgomery coats coat like fracks, completed with ankle length shearling high collar/scarves. All told, a Chinese designer with an Irish name determined to create his own visual vocabulary.

See catwalk

Finished with erratically sized bells, sewn on hats, shoulders and ties. Or knitted leather ponchos in a horse pattern all added oomph.
 
The thousand-year-old caravans of the Ancient Tea Horse Road evoked with matelassé cloaks, deep pile flocked cotton coats and raw suede coats completed with three giant frontal messenger pockets. Yet all subverted by Yellowstone cowboy hats – John Dutton-meets-Marco Polo mood, meets Zheng-He grit.
 
Driven on by a superb deep trance soundtrack courtesy of the charmingly named Temple Rat and worn by a cast that clearly loved the clothes.
 
Two decades after Chinese designers began appearing on European runways, one is still pressed to name a half-dozen standouts. But one of them surely is Sean Suen. For this quite simply was the best Chinese menswear we have ever seen.