30 designs imbued with the breath of Eastern culture are presented in the 2026 Couture Spring - Summer collection " Stairway to Heaven - Steps to Paradise" by designer Ha Linh Thu. The collection is inspired by the song of the same name by the legendary rock band led Zeppelin and the spirit of Psychedelic Rock - a music genre that has been associated with Ha Linh Thu for many years.
The Rock spirit became a guiding principle throughout the female designer's fashion journey, starting from the "November Rain" collection in 2009 and increasingly expressed in recent collections, creating a different design style in the Vietnamese fashion industry.
In a recent show in France, designer Ha Linh Thu brought the brilliant silk velvet "heavenly garden" to France through 30 looks of the collection. In that garden, "sadness is only temporary, joy is forever" is expressed through the transformation from strong tones of red, green, yellow, orange to deep tones such as brown, black.
According to Ha Linh Thu, the garden of paradise is the place where all souls wish to go after life in the dead, so it must be a garden of happiness and joy. Therefore, the shapes of the designs in the collection are sexy, free and soaring, like the spirit of the garden.
The highlight of the collection - also a familiar image in Ha Linh Thu's designs: The snake - one of the mascots of Eastern culture. The image of the snake contains many layers of meaning in religion, literature, art of each cultural region, with good - evil, both love and regeneration.
"To create a snake in fashion is a big challenge. I felt the grace, softness, and fragility of the snake, the temptation, although tactful but intelligent, and so it attracted me" - Ha Linh Thu said.
In this collection, flower motifs such as herbs, peach blossoms... bring romance and soaring to Ha Linh Thu's "land garden". These flowers have been exploited by designers in many collections before, but this time, they are more brilliant and intense than ever when shown with outstanding tones and meticulous hand-embroidered techniques.
An easily recognizable thing in " Stairway to Heaven", Ha Linh Thu almost limited the use of bold open-cut-outs that tended to cut the cup in a non-linear, free direction and develop traditional design shapes, patterns, and embroidery techniques.
According to the "nh du vay luong woman", she restrained her freedom to move towards elegant classicalism as an inevitability of the creative cycle in fashion. However, she is still loyal to two typical materials: Nhung, silk, combined with traditional embroidery, 3D embroidery, and sophisticated clamps, making each design a song of the song, both feminine and generous, profound and brilliant.
