PH5 is a young brand that’s continually building out its product categories. As a result, every meeting we have feels a bit like Christmas. New reveals for resort include mesh tops, monochrome looks that play with opacity by combining mesh and knit, and reflective styles. Yet with this collection, designer Zoe Champion and founder and CEO Wei Lin did more than add SKUs, they took a step forward in terms of aesthetics.

Having played with the idea of pressed flowers for fall, Champion continued to look “at different forms of pressing and printing and ways to record something other than photographs.” She landed on the ancient Japanese art of gyotaku, where fishermen would ink fish and press them on paper to create prints. This provided the designer with a piscine theme. Its most literal iteration was a fish jacquard skirt. Opaque fish shapes that swim around the torso protect the wearer’s modesty on mesh tops, while crochet fish barely did the same on deeply scoop-necked peplum tops that could be worn front to back for those in a more chaste mood. Iridescent sequins played with the idea of shimmering fish scales, as did heat-pressed rhinestones on mesh.
Furthering the theme were engineered knits with Lurex that captured the glimmering surface of water, these feature tucks that were made in the process of knitting, which mimicked ripples. This was an effective extension and abstraction of the organizing theme. Collected on a sweater with novelty buttons was a spiral shell, a branch of seaweed, and the requisite fish. Paired with a solid knit mini this would be a neat take on the “lady” suit; one that might even net Lin and Champion some new customers.