The Commission Designers Are Turning Into Their Fathers

It is often said that we eventually turn into our parents. For Dylan Cao, Jin Kay, and Huy Luong, the threesome behind the rising New York brand Commission, that cliché was a source of inspiration for their new menswear capsule, which they launched this fall exclusively on SSENSE after three years designing for women. "The older we get, the more similar we find the way that we dress to how our fathers dressed before," laughs Cao, who grew up in Vietnam, as did Luong, while Kay is from South Korea. "I used to go through high school sort of despising the way my dad dressed because I was like, 'That looks so dated.' But then as I moved here and graduated and started going to work, I started dressing like my dad."

The transition was, Cao adds, "really organic" for the trio, who have always looked to their mothers’ style as professional women in Asia in the Eighties and Nineties. "It's a very natural extension of the brand," he continues, "because a lot of our womenswear inspirations and references are really deep-rooted in menswear, men’s tailoring, men’s layering." Their trademark flower-print blouses and pencil skirts are now joined by knit polos and boxy suiting reminiscent of a time when Asia began undergoing rapid growth as it flourished economically and culturally, taking inspiration from European and American style and adding its own characteristic touches.

Several of the pieces are unisex, bridging the two sides of the Commission universe, and Cao expects that this expansion into menswear will lead to new creative explorations, with a base of solid staples offering the opportunity for more adventurous designs. "The approach that we decided to move forward with is that our menswear will always be this classic, more controlled version of our vision," he explains, "whereas our womenswear from now on will be a little bit more experimental and a lot more fluid."

As the industry begins to reconsider its long history of cultural appropriation and after a rise in anti-AAPI violence, the timing is also right for a re-evaluation of longstanding stereotypes. "It's a lot about dismantling this expectation of how an Asian man is expected to look or to carry himself," Cao explains. "The difference is we don't look at our Asian culture as some exotic point of view," Kay adds. "We understand our culture more personally and are thinking about how we were actually experiencing it when we were growing up." By making a statement with their designs, the three are reviving an entire continent’s worth of style that is currently underrepresented in high-end fashion. "Our goal is to tell that story from the inside out, which I think is a lot more nuanced," Cao continues. "Debunking these stereotypical tropes of Asian culture and Asian individuals is super important to us, but it's something we would like to communicate through what we do, which is clothing and imagery. I think it amplifies a lot more strongly when we use the medium that we are most well-versed in, which is an honest method to do it."

For more information, please visit Commission.nyc. Read this story and many more in print by preordering our third issue here.