The Bite Magazine - Autumn/Winter 2025 - Issue 38

bitefashion Mia Zhang reviews ANNAKIKI’S AW25 ‘Future Forest - Wild Birth’ collection shown at Milan Fashion Week. I n Milan this season, the runway became a battleground between circuitry and skin. Under flickering lights and a soundtrack pulsing like synthetic heartbeats, designer Anna Yang’s latest collection for ANNAKIKI, ‘Future Forest – Wild Rebirth’ unfolded as a manifesto for survival in the al- gorithmic age. Where most designers chase the future through sleek minimalism, Yang chases it through mutation by imag- ining what happens when nature and machine stop resisting each other and instead fuse into something new, unpredicta- ble, and strangely alive. Since establishing her label in 2012, Yang has cultivated an aes- thetic that feels both alien and intimately human, consistently questioning how technology reshapes emotion and identity, and how the digital gaze refracts the body. But this season, her interrogation turns visceral. The collection envisions a metal- lic forest, an ecosystem in which data streams have replaced rivers, and mechanical flora bloom under electric skies. It’s a world where humans, forced to adapt to algorithmic rule, re- discover their primal instincts to survive. The first look set the tone: a sculptural jacket bristling with metallic barbs, its sil- houette somewhere between armour and exoskeleton. The Barbed Jacket, one of the collection’s key pieces, suggests defence, defiance, and evolution all at once. The shoulders, sharply cut in three-dimensional planes, recall the defensive posture of a creature sensing danger. Yet the surface, gleaming under the light, speaks of modern industry, of the cold preci- sion of code. In the warrior’s world, she is no longer a figure of myth but of adaptation, a hybrid being negotiating the space between hardware and heartbeat.