Caroline Hú’s ‘Fairytale’: Beauty in a Broken World
Makeup designer and beauty editor Astrid Kearney reports for ZOOT from Paris Fashion Week SS27, taking us backstage at Caroline Hú’s Fairytale presentation. Up close with the hair, makeup and beauty teams, bringing the designer’s dreamlike vision to life.
This is all about Reverie by Caroline Hú
Article and photos by Astrid Kearney
Backstage production Sitdown Production
Hair Eugene Souleiman at Streeters
Make up Academy of Freelance Makeup at Mccluskey PR
Lead make up artist Giuliana Trumb
Illustrators Sonja Llamas Baños , Dolls in a row & Louise Boughton
Casting director Nicola Kast
Collection styled by Caroline Hu‘s team
Sound artist Maison Labtoni
At Paris Fashion Week SS27, Caroline Hú invited us into a world where fantasy meets decay and romance takes a darker turn.
For REVERIE, her label established in 2018, Hú began not with a sketch but with a story: a 2,000-word fairytale she wrote herself, using fiction to explore her surroundings and the uncertainties of the world around her. Its protagonist leaves home, enters a crumbling castle and becomes trapped in an unfamiliar world. With each collection, Hú continues to build an evolving narrative, adding a new chapter to the story. For SS27, that chapter is “Fairytale”. Lines from her own fairytale were hand-embroidered onto the garments.
Romantic yet experimental, Caroline Hú translates this unsettling journey into intricate craftsmanship, hand smocking, sculptural volume and fine lace. Patchworked fabrics, delicate beadwork and tiny beaded ants nibbling at the fabric suggest beauty being slowly consumed. Fragments of the story find their way onto the garments themselves, blurring the boundary between written narrative and wearable art.
For this season, Hú created an original fairy tale as the starting point for her collection. Its protagonist leaves home, only to find herself lost in an unfamiliar, decaing castle. It is a haunting narrative of discovery and transformation. Rather than offering an escapist fantasy, Hu explores what happens when beauty survives amid uncertainty.
There was something deliberately imperfect about it all. These were not pristine, picture-book princesses or fairytale endings neatly tied with a ribbon. Instead, Hú found poetry in the damaged, the strange and the unfinished. The collection’s beauty lay in its contrasts: softness against grit, intricacy against disarray, and innocence against the unfamiliar.
Beauty followed the same haunting narrative. Skin was pushed towards an almost spectral finish, while eyes and lips carried a bitten, otherworldly quality — beauty that felt touched by something unsettling rather than conventionally romantic.
Hair provided an equally striking contrast. Sleek as glass, it was polished to an almost liquid perfection, before the frame of the face and the hair at the nape defied gravity in unexpected directions. Under the mastery of hair guru Eugene Souleiman, the familiar was made strange, the precision disrupted by an almost supernatural edge. It was a study in contrasts: immaculate yet unruly, controlled yet otherworldly — perfectly in tune with Hú’s vision of a fairytale in which the magic is never entirely innocent.
Presented in Paris on 2 October, “Fairytale” einforced Hú’s distinctive position within contemporary fashion: a designer who treats clothing as a vehicle for storytelling, using fabric, silhouette and painstaking detail to build an emotional landscape.
In Hu’s world, fantasy is not necessarily an escape from reality. It is a way of confronting it, finding fragments of wonder in places where the magic seems to have faded. And perhaps that is what makes this fairytale so compelling: its beauty is not found in perfection, but in what remains when the story begins to unravel.
Rather than offering a neatly resolved fantasy, Caroline Hu´s “Fairytale” leaves us with an open ending. Nothing is quite as it seems: this is no picture-book fantasy, but a story of softness against grit, innocence against the unknown, and the search for beauty in a world that feels increasingly difficult to romanticise.
To boot…
REVERIE by Caroline Hú
@carolineqiqi
Born in Shenzhen, China, Caroline Hú grew up around art. Her father was an oil painter, and she studied oil painting and ceramics herself before turning to fashion. After graduating in womenswear from Central Saint Martins in London, she completed her master’s degree at Parsons School of Design in New York in 2017. She went on to work with Jason Wu and Tory Burch, specialising in textile design, before launching her own label in 2018.
Hú approaches fashion through the eyes of an artist. Painting informs the way she layers colour, texture and fabric, often creating the impression of brushstrokes on the body. Her clothes are meticulously constructed, with a focus on craftsmanship and emotional expression. She won the inaugural BoF China Prize in 2019 and was a semifinalist for the LVMH Prize that year. In 2023, her label was renamed Reverie by Caroline Hú.
ASTRID KEARNEY, makeup artist, creative & writer
www.astridkearney.com I @astridkearneymakeup
Read more from Astrid for ZOOT here.
