The New York label’s latest presentation, designed by VisionX at Cosmos Gallery, stages the gap between public persona and private identity as a full-blown runway experience.
There is a version of you that goes to work, attends dinners, and moves through the world with practiced ease. There is another version that exists only when no one is watching. Jiao’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection, presented last season at Cosmos Gallery on West 27th Street in New York, was built entirely around that gap.
The collection’s title, “The Other Side of Self,” and its guiding phrase, “it’s not like you are you,” arrive not as abstract provocations but as the literal design brief. Every garment, every textile choice, every staging decision traces back to the same question: what does clothing do when it is both the armor of a public persona and the quiet expression of something more private?
Jiao answers by splitting the wardrobe in two and then stitching it back together. Structured silhouettes move through the presentation alongside fluid organza pieces and ethereal ombré gradations. The two impulses do not resolve neatly into a unified aesthetic. They contradict each other, which is precisely the point. The public self and the private self rarely coexist without friction, and Jiao has no interest in pretending otherwise.
A custom textile collaboration with Freda Xia adds weight to that argument. Xia, a CFDA Next Thread Scholar and interdisciplinary artist, brought a tactile specificity to the collection that separates it from purely conceptual runway work. The fabrics carry the tension the concept demands: surfaces that feel one way and read another, materials that shift in the light. When the clothes are doing this kind of work, the idea stops being a press-release abstraction and becomes something a body actually experiences.
The scenography, designed and curated by VisionX, was engineered to the same ends. The presentation at Cosmos Gallery did not begin at the runway. It began in a soft-pink infinity hallway, a deliberately intimate passage that stripped away external noise before the main gallery opened up. From that compressed, almost confessional space, the room expanded into overlapping translucent textiles, mirrored surfaces, and fluid architectural forms that bent light and dissolved the line between the person watching and the person being watched.
This was not just a decorative set design, because the spatial sequence mirrored the psychological arc of the collection. The hallway is a decompression chamber, and the gallery is the place where the constructed self starts to come apart.
Ten models moved through this environment across the course of the presentation, and the narrative built incrementally. Early looks leaned into formality and structure. As the show progressed, those constructions began to loosen. More intimate expressions surfaced. The shift was gradual and unannounced, which made it more convincing than any dramatic reveal could have been. By the end, the audience had watched ten people perform the exact negotiation the collection was describing: the slow, conditional work of letting something true show through.
Fashion has long functioned as a social contract. What you wear to a board meeting and what you wear alone on a Sunday morning are not arbitrary choices; they are communications, some deliberate and some not. Jiao’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection does not argue that one is more authentic than the other. The structured coat is not a lie and the fluid organza is not the truth. They are both real, both chosen, both part of the same person navigating the same world.
What Jiao and VisionX staged at Cosmos Gallery was a presentation about concealment and disclosure, but it avoided the easy moral of shedding armor and revealing your true self. The collection is more skeptical than that, and more interesting for it. The question it leaves open is not whether you are showing your real self, but whether a single version of yourself, dressed in any single garment, could ever carry the whole story.
Fashion by Jiao @jiaobyjo
Scenography, Experience & Production by VisionX @visionx.space
Creative Director & Fashion Designer | Jo Jiao @jiaobyjo @jaojo
Scenographer & Architect | Zhen Tong @visionx.space @ra9narok
Experience Director & Producer | Sherry Wen @visionx.space @wensherryyy
Show Director & Creative Consultant | Xiaoji Zhou @xiaoji.zzz
Public Relations | REP Agency @repnyc
FASHION
Technical Designer | Ariana Pearson @sewsoulwithariana
Stylist | Claire Manor @clairemanor
Studio Assistant | Selina Nie, Stephanie LaPointe, Joanne Chou, Claire Casto, Emily Bennett,
Juliet Peng, Tina Ye, Zefang Hu, Rebecca Xue
Fashion Production Team | Joanne Au, Phoenix Luit, Reis Becker, Kenley Shen, Mackenzie Smith,
Benjamin Skrelunas, Sabina Jolis, Elizabeth Hughes, Adela Hahm
Model | Adelia Nazarova, Alexie Olivo, Amanda Haffner, Amau Deng, Anna Greene, Britain
Lonie, Makenzie Divito, Molie Onyongo, Sophia Williams, Vree Welch, Zina Harrington
Bag Sponsor | Kristi Fleckenstein @pochettenyc
Collaborating Artist | Freda Xia @fredaxia
SCENOGRAPHY, EXPERIENCE & PRODUCTION
Food & Floral Direction & Production | Alyssa Won @__bonne.nuit
Show Coordinator | Selina Nie @selina.nie
Scenography Assistant | Nancy (Yijia) Liu
Studio Assistant | Andrew Wheat
Installation Lead | Jianhao Cai
Installation Assistant | Xiaoxu Han, Eric Liu
Production Coordinator | Isabel Li, Seo Yeon Choi, Xiao Xiao
Interactive Designer | Good People Factory @goodpeoplefactory, Julia Xu, Xiaoxu Han,
Zongshuai Zhang, Ivy (Yiyun) Jiang, Haoren Zhong
CREATIVE COLLABORATORS
Photographer | Anna Arnet @anna.arnet, Sherry Wen @wensherryyy, Justin Pang @it_me___jp,
Chao Li @chaot7c, Joey Wang @joeywang
Videographer | Jennie (Xinyi) Tan @cheerioxin, Xin Du @xindu842
Music Producer & DJ | Christian Ernesto Minaya @christianminaya
Makeup Lead | Vea Bak @burnbeautyofficial
Hair Lead | Melissa Tallo (UNITE)@Melissa___tello
