Chalk it up to Bella Hadid’s widely-documented cowboy era or to the influence of Vogue cover-certified horse girls Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner, but something about stomping around in some leather fringe and cowboy boots has conquered the hearts of fashion-minded twenty-somethings.
At face value, Mark Gong’s spring collection suggests that he’s clocked the trend. But actually, Gong was a pioneer. It was in 2019 that he first riffed on the cowgirl theme, and this season he gave it a do-over. “I was chatting with my friends and said I would like to re-do it” he said. The impetus was a movie night featuring the 1991 Ridley Scott film Thelma and Louise.
“I know it’s not a movie about cowboys,” Gong said, explaining that he was attracted to the rebellious, freewheeling energy of its main characters, two defining traits of who he calls his “Gong Girls.” It also inspired him, he said, to look at the American West with a more feminine point of view, rather than from the male gaze with which he designed that first connection.
He mostly pulled it off, with the exception of the funny but mostly just gratuitous rearview mirror and police siren bra tops—which were actually designed in collaboration with the women-led jewelry design studio Yvumin. Other models carried gas pumps and wore outlandishly long thigh-high boots with their fringed and ruffled clothes.
Some of the fun leather pencil skirts and bandeau tops he made were embossed or embroidered with tooling motifs, which reappeared on his power tailoring and low stacked heel boots (“young women are less interested in high heels!”). He also showed t-shirts and jeans and cargo pants, and unveiled an extension of his ongoing Nike collab. Together it made for a covetable, commercial collection, delectably packaged as an entertaining story. All in all, Gong is proving to be one of Shanghai’s most proficient designer-merchants.