LFW AW26 - INFDark - Interview - A Sci-Fi Inspired Show

"Actually, I think it’s the moment when the worm comes out from the cocoon," says Kuo Wei, when asked where his AW26 collection begins. "That moment is the eclosion. It’s becoming into a new form." It’s a strange, specific word for a strange, specific idea, and it turns out to explain the whole collection in one image.

INFDark’s Autumn/Winter 2026 show, held on Sunday 23rd February at Protein Studios in Shoreditch as part of Fashion Scout’s On-Schedule LFW programme is built around that in-between moment. The point, Kuo says, isn’t the finished outfit. Most fashion shows only ever give you the end result: the polished silhouette, the final version, the look as a finished item. INFDark wants the opposite: “We’re using the same design unit piece by piece, but it grows stronger, or lesser. This growing process is what the eclosion means.”

In practice, that means the bits of a garment that usually stay hidden, the inside seams, the raw edges (etc.) all get pulled to the surface and become the design. Layers come off. A pair of trousers cinches shorter; a shirt opens out wider. Most of the looks could be worn more than one way. For a designer who founded INF back in 2011 and has built a name on clothes that bend and shift with the body, it feels like the clearest version yet of an idea he’s been chasing for years. His own motto, printed across the brand’s materials, puts it bluntly: “Design is based on paranoid and suspect.”

Nothing in an INF show ever looks quite finished, and that’s exactly the point.

The opening looks set the tone. A loose black shirt with a half-collapsed collar is worn over trousers that gather and slacken with every step. Faces are ghost-pale, lips smudged dark, with a single thin line drawn from the bottom lip downward like a stitch running into the skin. Safety pins shine in the models’ hair. Asked if the pins meant anything, Kuo is direct: “As every sci-fi movie, the end of evolving should be apocalypse. So that’s why we paint this a little Doom and Mad Max vibe over the shows. That’s why the pins come forward.” He names Blade Runner as a reference. The whole look is undone without ever tipping into fancy dress.

Then the rest arrive, and the concept fully clicks. The fabrics look creased, crumpled, covered in shadows and fold lines. They’re actually printed to look like the scrunched-up paper you’d use to draft a pattern, scanned and turned into a fabric design. A mustard-yellow two-piece reads like camouflage at first, then reveals itself as the outline of a balled-up rough draft, smoothed out and wearable. A blue shirt paired with grey trousers has the same trick going on: the trousers look like they’ve been fished straight out of a studio bin and given a second life. The clothes are literally wearing their own working-out. The crossings-out are the design.

The casting makes the same point. INFDark put younger and older models on the runway, men and women, without any obvious target customer in mind. Kuo shrugs it off. “For INF, it’s very important not to limit everything. We’re not trying to label anyone or tag anyone with the clothes. We’re trying to tell the story, and everyone can actually wear it no matter what kind of stage, what kind of age, what kind of sexual you are.”

Asked what people most misunderstand about his job, Kuo hesitates. “That’s kind of a harsh answer, are you sure you’re going to ask that?” He answers anyway. People only see the glossy side, he says. The show, the atmosphere, the makeup, the lighting. “For you guys to watch this show, it’s just 20 minutes. But for all the teams and members here, creators, we spend half a year in this project.” He pauses. “We’re not that good looking behind the story, behind the stage. That’s very important, because all this will go smooth only if you have prepared very hard. It’s very raw, it’s very real.”

It’s the same idea as the clothes, really: the messy, unglamorous part is the part that actually matters. The closing looks return to INF’s signature black. A deep V-neck jacket, cinched with a belt, is worn over cropped trousers and chunky platform boots, sharp but slightly unfinished at the hems, as if the model has walked out of a fitting halfway through and decided this version will do.

What sticks with you, once the last look has walked, is how seriously the collection connects the big idea to actually wearing the clothes. Kuo is quick to point out that sustainability isn’t the theme of AW26; that’s already built into how INF works. The theme is something a bit weirder and more useful. That a piece of clothing can keep becoming something new, the way a body does, the way months of unseen work do, the way a worm does when it stops being a worm.

Eclosion, then. Not an ending, far from it in fact. It’s a door left open at the rough-draft stage, with an invitation to keep editing.

All Images Courtesy of Black PR

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Written by Zak Downey

Edited by Abbey Villasis, Co-Fashion Editor