Frilly ruffles, prim bows, puffy sleeves, white lacy bloomers, and pearl-covered nails—these are just some of the design elements of Taiwanese designer Jen-Fang Shueh’s fashion brand, Jenny Fax. The rising designer takes divinely dark, feminine energy and mixes it with hyper-girlish subcultures for a new aesthetic that’s wholly from a woman’s point of view. Jenny Fax made its Paris Fashion Week debut for spring 2025, hosting a presentation inside a tiny Parisian café where a circle of women were seated, dressed in the collection. “It’s like, one woman posted something online and asked to meet up in here, and all different kinds of women came and had a meeting,” Shue explained of the vision behind the setup. “I wanted to show all different kinds of characters.”
In Jenny Fax’s world, women are the main characters—and they’ve lived multiple lives. One model in the presentation wore a long, pleated baby-blue dress with a starchy white collar that revealed itself upon second glance to be something else: what looked like bloomers, turned upside-down and pasted onto the dress. Her bag? A backpack with a cross and lamb that read, “I once was lost, but now I’m found.” (The inspiration was HBO’s early 2000s series Big Love.) Another model represented a tomboyish bar manager, while another starred as a mom on vacation, and yet another was a secretary who’d just finished her shift at the office. The genius of Jenny Fax is showing everyday, real-world women in everyday scenarios, subverted through the extreme Jenny Fax lens.
It’s not uncommon to see a Jenny Fax creation that supersizes the sleeves, ’80s style, and focuses on unconventional cutouts in unexpected areas (like the belly button!). Her work also includes oddly satisfying takes on nostalgia—think: grandma’s living room floral prints or shoulder pads placed on the hips, with a twist, like underwear plastered on top of a dress. “Because I come from Taiwan, our country had a lot of influence from America when I was child,” Shueh said. “That’s why I love American stuff.”
Shueh started her brand in 2011 in Tokyo, and has mostly presented during Tokyo Fashion Week in the past. During the pandemic, she took a break from runway shows and presentations and switched to releasing look books. Her PFW presentation in September was the first time showing outside of Tokyo. Although the brand has been around for over a decade, it has an if-you-know-you-know cache. For the spring 2025 collection, Jenny Fax collaborated with Angelic Pretty, one of the oldest Lolita-style brands founded in Tokyo in the 1970s, for shoes shaped like ballerina flats and chunky candy-colored shoes.
Jenny Fax creations take up space intentionally. Shueh often includes models of all sizes and shapes in her work, and in previous seasons created a silicone corset based on a 3-D scan of her own body, which was then used as an outer layer on some of the pieces she designed for her models. “If I want to design something, I find the things from my memory, all the things I’ve seen in movies and TV shows,” she says of her creative process. One thing is for sure—under all those ruffles, lace-y little things, and subversive pastels, women are at the center of Jenny Fax’s narrative. “The woman is everything,” she says of her biggest focus as a designer. “I feel like we always have to show this positive vibe. But I think it’s also good to show if you’re not happy. You don’t have to pretend. That’s really important.”