Paris, 2017
On the last night of Fashion Week, our founder, Vivian So, stepped onto a rain-slicked Rue de Rivoli wearing a midnight-blue gown she had sewn in her tiny Montmartre studio. A stranger mistook her for the show’s closing model and asked for a photograph. That single click of a camera shutter became the heartbeat of xvbvso.
Vivian had not come to Paris to start a brand; she had come to decide whether to leave fashion forever. After three years of cutting linings for another couture house, she felt her sketches—full of liquid silks, asymmetric necklines, and starlit bead-work—would never be more than pages in a notebook. The impromptu photo changed her mind. If one dress could stop traffic, perhaps an entire collection could move the world.
She flew home to Shanghai, cashed in her savings, and converted her grandmother’s abandoned lace-making workshop into a daylight-filled atelier. The name xvbvso was born from the shorthand Vivian used to sign her college projects—“XV” for the Roman numeral fifteen, the age she made her first gown, and “BVSO” for her initials rearranged the way she rearranged patterns on her cutting table. The lowercase letters are deliberate: the brand is always in progress, never finished.
From the outset, xvbvso refused the traditional calendar. Instead of seasons, we design for moments: the first toast at a rooftop engagement, the hush before a conductor’s downbeat at a charity gala, the 3 a.m. birthday when the city lights feel like confetti. Our seamstresses work in pairs—one master, one apprentice—so every crystal is stitched twice: once for perfection, once for legacy. We source dead-stock silk from Como, surplus sequins from Beirut, and recycled tulle from leftover ballet costumes; sustainability is not an initiative, it is our inheritance.
In 2019, the “Nova” gown—an obsidian mermaid dress with a detachable overskirt of hand-painted galaxies—went viral after an indie singer wore it to the Grammys. Overnight, orders poured in from five continents. We could have scaled quickly, but we kept the atelier small: forty artisans, twenty dresses a week, each numbered like a limited-edition print. Our clients became patrons, often returning to watch their gowns take shape on the mannequin, sharing espresso and stories with the women sewing their dreams.
Today, xvbvso gowns have graced red carpets in Hollywood, candle-lit courtyards in Seville, and cliff-top ceremonies in Santorini. Yet our proudest milestone is quieter: every apprentice who graduates to master keeps a Polaroid of her first solo gown pinned above her station. The wall is already crowded.
We are still that rain-soaked dress on a Paris street—unexpected, unrepeatable, and convinced that elegance is not about being seen, but about being remembered long after the lights go down.
