Philly isn’t a city known for its avant–garde fashion scene, but for one night, it didn’t matter. Autumn Lin, a designer whose work has graced the pages of Vogue and the runways of New York, brought something this city rarely gets to witness: fashion as myth, fashion as movement, fashion as a dream in motion. The show wasn’t about trends or commerce—it was about transformation.
Drexel—educated Autumn Lin doesn’t just design clothing. She builds worlds, bending fabric, light, and digital space into something that moves beyond the body. Known for her sculptural couture and her signature zipper–infused creations, Lin has dressed icons like Cher, Kylie Minogue, and Steve Aoki, crafted pieces for British Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar Vietnam, and been handpicked by Rihanna on Bravo’s Styled to Rock. But "Immersive Dreams" is something else entirely.
This is not a collection in the traditional sense. There is no orderly parade of models, no linear progression of looks. Instead, Lin turns the very idea of a fashion show inside out, creating an immersive, living painting where clothing, projection, and movement fuse into something uncanny, surreal, and unshakably beautiful. She has never been a designer who follows convention, but here, she fully abandons the idea that fashion must be confined to runways or mannequins. The garments are not static. The show does not exist as a fixed moment in time. "Immersive Dreams" unfolds, shifts, breathes.
It is fitting that Lin is currently pursuing a doctorate in creative technologies at Columbia, where she is exploring the intersection of fashion and digital fabrication. More than most designers working today, she understands that the future of couture is not just in what is worn, but in how it interacts with the space around it.
The exhibit—shown at Philly Fashion Week, a city that rarely plays host to conceptual couture—marks a turning point. This is not fashion as we know it. This is fashion as environment, as experience, as something that refuses to be captured in a single frame.
The experience of walking into "Immersive Dreams" is like stepping into a canvas before the paint has dried. Vast, turbulent projections of gothic landscapes and storm–lit cathedrals pulse against the walls, swallowing the space in a chiaroscuro of ruin and resurrection. The models—if you can even call them that, because calling them “models” is like calling the Pietà a sculpture and leaving it at that—are positioned within the scenery like apparitions caught mid–materialization. At times, they barely move. When they do, it is deliberate, glacial, as if each step is another brushstroke on an unfinished masterpiece.
One woman, her train glowing under the shifting light, appears less like she is wearing fabric and more like she is dissolving into it. Another stands with metallic wings unfurled, something between a saint and a weapon, her corseted bodice gleaming like an exoskeleton. There is something Baroque in these figures—the grandeur, the reverence—but there is also something darker, something post–human. These are not angels in the way one might imagine them. These are angels before the fall.
Lin’s work is, at its core, an exploration of the sublime, but not in the delicate, watered–down way that word has been dragged through Instagram poetry captions and boutique hotel branding. This is the sublime of Caspar David Friedrich—vast, consuming, disorienting. The kind of beauty that does not comfort, but unsettles. It is the cathedral so large you feel like an insect beneath it. The lightning storm over an endless sea. The sound of your own breath in a room too empty to hold it. It is, to borrow a phrase from Edmund Burke, beauty that terrifies you a little.
That terror is essential. Fashion loves to play with divinity, but rarely does it lean into the divine as something alien and unknowable. There are echoes of Mugler here, in the way Lin constructs her figures as untouchable, celestial beings, but where Mugler’s vision was sharp–edged, hyper–femme, and impossibly powerful, Lin’s is more elusive. Her models do not command attention; they withdraw from it, existing just beyond reach, more haunting than seductive. They are not here to be worshipped. They are here to remind you that you are temporary.
It is impossible to talk about "Immersive Dreams" without talking about motion—or rather, the illusion of it. The real brilliance of Lin’s work is not just in the construction of the garments but in how they interact with the world around them. Unlike traditional couture, which relies on the weight of embroidery, the structure of boning, or the architecture of draping, these pieces feel like they exist in collaboration with the digital realm. The fabric does not just move; it absorbs, refracts, shifts.
Here, Lin diverges from the sculptural philosophy of Iris van Herpen, whose pieces mimic organic forms like water or wind, and instead leans into something more ephemeral. The dresses feel half–there, mutable, like something you could reach for but never quite grasp. They do not simply reflect light; they are consumed by it, transformed by it, rewritten by it.
In this way, Lin is playing with the very nature of what fashion is supposed to do. Couture, in its most basic sense, is an exercise in permanence hand–sewn, meticulous, meant to be preserved. Lin’s work rejects permanence entirely. These garments only exist fully within the show itself, in the space between projection and presence. To see them in a still image is to see only half of them. They are not meant to be worn; they are meant to be witnessed.
The city has long been resistant to conceptual fashion, favoring a commercial, streetwear–driven aesthetic that—while vibrant—rarely strays into the experimental. Lin’s arrival is a shock to the system, a declaration that avant–garde, immersive, high–concept couture has a place in Philly’s fashion scene.
And it is not just that she was here. It is how she was here. Lin didn’t just show a collection; she created a world, an atmosphere, a moment that felt entirely removed from the constraints of geography. Philly has never looked like this.
