Linxi Zhu is a fashion designer and a digital material innovator who creates virtual fashion with her own materials. She takes the body as a medium, using fashion as a tool to communicate the surroundings. Her work focuses on building connections that transcend tangible fabrics into digital forms while exploring the uniqueness of these digital equivalents. She challenges current existing fashion fabrics and pushes the boundaries of digital fashion’s materiality.
Linxi Zhu
Linxi and her partner Panny Yu are working on a digital fashion project called Formless.
Formless is a virtual fashion accessories laboratory and a design house that curates events and shifts fashion experience with immersive technologies.
Formless focuses on the relationship between the body, objects and the virtual world, and how they shape the creation of new tools, materials and networks. Formless' design philosophies are built from an emotional perspective, influenced by our distinctive natures. Through creating virtual fantasies, Formless presents a niche concept by creating new 'wearable' materials that will reassess the idea of goods valuation, properties and ownership. It forges a new relationship between virtual reality and fashion, presenting them in a new digital space. It challenges how a digital-only item could be 'worn' through innovative uses of 3D and AR technologies. Formless uses digital approaches to allow fashion more than stimulation and production, but with an add-on value, such as interaction, motion, adaptability and sustainability.
In the RCA 2021 exhibition, Formless presents a series of fully digitalised fashion materials and designs that were free from the constraints of the laws of physics. Formless also launches its first virtual exhibition 'Forming In-Between' in its own mobile app.
Forming Paradise — 3D: Linxi Zhu, Panny Yu; Animation: Linyou Xie; Music: Oakvale of Albion
Forming Paradise Materials — Illuminating Fur
Forming Paradise Materials — Floating Feather
Forming Paradise Materials — Microing Tentacles
Forming Paradise Materials — Waving Spine
Forming Paradise Material Collection — Floating Feather, Waving Spine, Illuminating Fur, Microing Tentacles
Defying Gravity — Eyewear
Defying Gravity — Model: Ruoyi; Photographer: Xinyu Fang
Sparkling Eyewear — Posts from Linxi Zhu, Qi Li, Alessandro Troiani, Ji Wang, Hao Yu, Ameya Mhaisalkar, Nomi, Lei, Aro, Monte Wren
Forming In-Between Poster — Visual: Spe Alien; Designers: Panny Yu, Xiaoqin Li, Keiga Hua Hui, Jungna Nana Park, Sam Chester, Zongbo Jiang, Linxi Zhu, Feyfey Yufei Liu, Abi Sheng
Forming In-Between is the first collective virtual fashion exhibition curated by Formless. The exhibition is an immersive space established between the physical and the virtual world, where we explore the possibility of virtual fashion’s presence within various media platform.