Grit, Illusions, and Functionality: The Impossible Objects Showroom
Split my Day 2 PFW recap into two parts. One for the presentations, and one for the Impossible Objects showroom — featuring Jeong Li, meanswhile, and Neithers.
Before We Start
If you’re new here, you can catch up on some recent work:
Patience, Process, and the Everyday: Kartik Research & Vowels AW26: Two presentations that slowed things down in the best way: Kartik Research and Vowels. One grounded in craft and heritage, the other built on research, routine, and the poetry of the everyday.
I Lost My Luggage Going to Men’s Fashion Week: Reporting from Paris — moving between showrooms, missed luggage, and conversations around slower fashion, locality, and material honesty.
I Think, Therefore I Tastemake: My thoughts on tastemaking, influence, and intention in modern content — exploring slow style, fatigue, and what’s to come
New Year, New (Kinda the Same) Me: A year-end reflection on growth, fear, and staying honest — along with the designers and pieces that caught my eye recently
Basic? (How Japanese brands get labelled “boring” or “expensive,” and the disconnect between passion, content, and algorithm-driven taste)
If you’re enjoying Duchump and want to help keep it going, consider subscribing.
Between tracking down pieces, speaking with designers, and writing these essays, this project takes more time than my weekly screen-time report would like to admit. Your support genuinely makes this possible.
Thank you for being here.
Jeong Li — Showroom
Okay, so one thing I’ve learned from this whole experience is that good time management is key. Jumping from one showroom to another — when the next is 2km away in a city like Paris, where streets are narrow and taking an Uber is somehow the worst possible option — can be brutal when appointments are stacked back to back.
All of this to say: my time at the Impossible Objects showroom was minimal, and that’s on me. Still, it didn’t stop me from seeing some genuinely extraordinary clothing. To kick things off, let’s talk about Jeong Li.
Based in Seoul, Jeong Li blends elevated technical wear with everyday functionality, adding a subtle twist of the avant-garde this season — most notably through one garment that quite honestly blew me away. For AW26, the brand leans into a colour palette that feels especially prevalent in menswear right now: grounded, earthy tones like browns, greys, blues, and a muted, Easter-tinged yellow.
Where brands such as Auralee, Bisown, and Yoko Sakamoto often use this palette to create collections that feel calm and soothing on the eyes, Jeong Li uses it differently — contrasting those hues against harsher, moodier garments. The result feels heavier, more charged, almost reflective of the current state of the world — which was my immediate takeaway when viewing the collection.
It felt as though Jeong was channeling what’s happening around us, offering a body of work that mirrors our environments right now. Whether that’s the case, or if that’s my own personal subconscious chiming in, is yet to be determined.
Despite that edge, the brand remains firmly rooted in wearability. “We’re really leaning into this idea of a city escape,” Jeong shared while walking me through the collection. “Good layering pieces — practical, but still refined.” Their nylon, water-resistant puffers, in particular, stood out as ideal options for wetter, windier climates.