EXCLUSIVE: Jason Wu Shares a First Look at His Artist Collaboration for Spring 2025

The writing won’t be on the wall at Jason Wu’s upcoming presentation during New York Fashion Week, it’ll be on the clothes. 

For his spring 2025 collection, which will parade around the gardens outside Hudson Yards on Sunday, the designer has collaborated with Taiwanese artist Tong Yang-Tze (also known as Ms. Tong), renowned for her large-scale calligraphic paintings.

In an interview, Wu explained fashion, like art, “has to be a reaction to what’s going on in culture, so it’s always nice to have this meeting of the minds.

But on a basic level, Ms. Tong just makes beautiful things, so it’s great to be able to partner with her for this occasion,” he said.

Reflecting on his previous artist tie-ins, like Kaws’ graffiti-florals for spring 2012 and Isamu Nguchi’s sunken garden, which served as both inspiration and mise-en-scene for spring 2024, Wu said this one holds special resonance. He has long felt a kinship with Tong who was born in China and later moved to America for schooling, so “her story is very much a mirror of my own, but in a different generation,” he said. 

It wasn’t until Wu’s friend Leslie Ma, associate curator of contemporary Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum, suggested they meet that the two connected via Zoom. 

The museum recently selected Tong for its 2024 Great Hall Commision to be unveiled in November. At age 82, it will be her first major display in the United States. “She’s very well known in Asia, but people are not as familiar with her work elsewhere,” Wu said. 

Thinking about Tong’s calligraphy in abstract terms, Wu is calling the collection “Ink,” something he associates closely with childhood. “I had to learn to do calligraphy in elementary school and her work kind of took me back there,” he said. “I started thinking about how to use it in a way that isn’t just something printed on a garment. I wanted to really understand what she does and express it through my medium.”

This led him to experiment with embroidery and silk-screening techniques, while the gestural shapes of Tong’s characters more loosely informed his silhouettes. “You can see how her strokes done with such a big brush creates really beautiful lines that almost look like they should be wrapped around the body,” Wu said.

If one collaboration wasn’t enough, Wu has invited Los Angeles-based technology consultant Elise Co and artist Ben Borden to construct the runway set, giving them little to go on apart from his chosen word: “Ink.”

Their interpretation, a 21-foot-high structure made from precision-cut sheet steel titled “INK 01 / 6A 6B 6C,” will be mounted at the show venue within a scaffolding frame, allowing models to move around and through it. The temporary installation was underwritten by Madworkshop, a nonprofit supporting socially valuable design projects.

“I thought it was just a nice way to link different worlds, people that would have never met otherwise,” said Wu of his creative dream team, “expressing one theme through three different sets of eyes.”