The must-know designers teasing our subconscious

Fashion has always been a kind of emotional technology — a way of coaxing what bubbles inside us into something that can live on the surface. In the rush and clamor of the fashion world, we wanted to pause and spotlight designers who treat clothing as psyche made tactile: a place where desire, instinct, ancestry, and vulnerability slip into the same material manifestation. Their work opens small passageways between the inner self and the outer shell, illuminating the subtle forces that guide how we guard, tempt, repel, or reveal one another wordlessly.

So, these are the must-know creators who make the stomach flutter through that strange, electric meeting of spirit and flesh their garments summon. From Shawna Wu’s talismanic material alchemy to Liza Keane’s psychoanalytic armour, Joseph William Raidt’s anatomical surrealism, Javier Collazo’s ancestral sensuality, and Cathy Meyong’s decolonial reimagining of the sacred — each of them stretches the meaning of what it is to inhabit a body, let alone dress one. In their hands, fashion becomes a prism: bending desires, warping the familiar contours of form, and tapping into the unruly architectures of feeling we carry beneath the skin.

Shawna Wu’s work is a goldmine of references — technical, spiritual, and symbolic — a body of craft you can keep excavating and still never reach the bottom. From her New York studio, she unearths and reanimates traditional Taiwanese carvings and Chinese knotting methods, transforming them into lingerie, body-skimming garments, and talismanic accessories that feel both ancient and subversively new. Every design choice is deliberate: her pieces are encoded with references spanning East Asian cosmologies, totemic symbols, and centuries-old craft traditions. Beneath it all lies a philosophy of ‘rich material culture’ — the idea that what we place on our bodies expounds tangible influence on our subconscious and quietly broadcasts our values. This is where her devotion to sacred materials shines. Pearls, recycled bone beads, jade: each one selected not for ornament alone but for the symbolism it offers. And honestly, if you’re going to armour your most intimate places, a jade bikini sounds equally spiritually shielding and cunty.

For Javier Collazo, fashion is “a way to touch, seduce, protect and reveal.” In line with this ethos, the Spanish-Cuban designer creates with intuition first, physical manifestation second. In Jinetero SS26, titled after the Cuban slang for “hustler”, Javier draws connections between his national heritage and queer culture, positioning the body as a ritual site. His signature oxidised look, whether appearing on actual metal pieces clasping chests and pelvises or as an illusory print over soft cottons and latex, conjures rust as memory, survival, and ancestral echo. There is a tender shyness in the nudity he shows: juxtaposingly, the softness of the body corroding heavy metals. Elsewhere, distressed denim and braided tulle pirouette in movement, evoking both lightness and weight. Javier’s work is about unveiling – a sensual revitalisation of the past and future.

There’s a magnetic tension at the heart of Liza Keane’s world, a sensual structuralism that makes her garments feel alive before they’ve even touched skin. The London-based designer transfigures silk and leather into “psychological armour,” a protection that reveals as much as it conceals. Her pieces take from the body — they seem drenched in its fluids, moulding themselves around curves and edges, merging with flesh to evoke a second skin. Yet at the same time, they hover just slightly above it, hinting at a presence beyond the physical: an entity, sculptural and uncanny. Think trompe-l’oeil nipples, exaggerated musculature, and anatomical details: clothing that slips into every crevice, visible or imagined, amplifying the body’s relief while warping it into something new. Drawing from psychoanalytic undercurrents (love to the Freudian slip dress), her work scratches at unconscious desires, exposing the contradictions and tensions that bind flesh and yearning. 

Cathy Meyong is the visionary behind Rosalía’s now-iconic feather-wing bra — but the story of her practice runs far deeper than the viral silhouette. Her work traces the fault lines of race relations in the Western world, using fashion as a site to challenge colonial misconceptions surrounding her Cameroonian heritage. Her CSM graduation collection confronted the visual violence of colonialism viscerally and provocatively. Antelope-horn collars, oversized fur adornements, bones – all echo the demonisation of West African spirituality by colonial powers, while exposing the hypocrisy of the current status quo. Today, those ideas appear in more subliminal forms like taxidermic wing motifs and splintering reindeer hide. Her pieces have an angelic, heavenly feel of a certain transcendence, but they also carry an animalistic, primeval charge — raw elements reimagined through a regal, decolonial lens. It’s this approach that has led Cathy to collaborations such as designing metal sets and the human-hair bodysuit for Mowalola, and has us excited for what’s to come next.

If Joseph William Raidt is not yet on your radar,  you are certainly missing out. His latest collection, People on People, is a striking excavation of the tangled romance between bodies and the things we drape over them. It’s surrealism rooted in the human shapes — limbs folding into each other, torsos melting together, all rising from preppy tartans, cowhide, and whisper-thin latex. The collection feels like a physical transcription of the emotional entanglements that knot our days — the friends we lean on, the lovers we absorb, the strangers we brush past without a second thought. Joseph’s eye for garment-morphing, subversive storytelling, and technical dedication (most of his shapes begin with old mattress foam btw) are definitely landing him on our must-watch map.