Professor.E

Professor.E is a Taipei-based fashion label founded in 2017 by Ken Rao, with Hsiu Wei Wu contributing as co-founder and conceptual graphic artist. The project developed from Rao’s Re-Lab experiments, which dismantled and recombined existing garments before the work expanded into seasonal ready-to-wear. The brand uses an anonymous, masked Professor E persona to keep attention on the collective studio, its materials and the construction of the clothes.

The collections draw on the long period of maritime exploration and cultural exchange between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, combining European court dress, military and workwear references with Asian garment traditions. This historical framework is filtered through relaxed contemporary silhouettes, displaced closures, patchwork, raw edges and surfaces altered by natural dyeing, rust effects, burning or repair. Menswear formed the initial base; womenswear entered the seasonal programme in Spring/Summer 2020.

Professor.E operates a mainline, an accessories and objects programme, and Forgotten Materials, a limited artisanal line formalised in 2022 from the earlier ONE-OFF series. The same year, the label established a physical presence at Ura.219 on Taipei’s Dihua Street, sharing the space with Japanese antiques, botanical installations and a coffee shop. Its distribution now extends through specialist retailers in Asia, Europe, North America and Australia while the house remains rooted in Taipei.

Professor.E treats time as a material condition. Fabrics are dyed, abraded, repaired and left with exposed edges so that construction and wear remain visible, while antique textiles and scarce yardage are adapted without erasing their previous use. The Forgotten Materials line makes this approach explicit through numbered pieces made from vintage European cloth, Chinese fragrant cloud yarn, Tussah silk, kimono weaves and other limited sources.

The studio combines historical research with an insistence on movement and contemporary use. Oversized tailoring, elongated layers and lowered rises are adjusted through buckles, drawstrings, asymmetric panels and convertible fastenings, allowing the wearer to alter proportion and drape. The resulting clothes retain the atmosphere of military, workwear and ceremonial garments without functioning as reproductions.

Anonymity is part of the design system. The masked Professor E figure and the collaborative authorship behind it resist the expectation that a fashion label must be organised around a visible individual personality. Campaigns, retail environments and garments instead form one continuous fictional archive in which old and new, Eastern and Western, refined and damaged materials remain in deliberate tension.