As the saying goes, it’s always Fashion Week somewhere. Just two weeks after the Paris shows ended, it was off to Shanghai Fashion Week. The seven day showcase is quickly becoming a must-see to rival the big four, with international labels flocking to the city for shows and activations, and the home-grown designers going global.
Last October, the shows marked SHFW’s return to pre-pandemic levels of activity. It was a buzzy, busy schedule, and the excitement, both from designers and the industry, was palpable. The story was a little different this time around. Designers everywhere are feeling the effects of the global economic slowdown, and the fact that Shanghai Fashion Week is a relatively young showcase at 21 years old (hey, at least it’s old enough to have a drink stateside) means that most of its designers are either independent and/or up-and-coming. Everywhere around the world, these are the talents that are consistently the most susceptible to feeling the strain of the economy.
Still, the city’s budding fashion community is resilient and determined. These are nimble creatives who know how to adapt—even in the midst of a conservative season, designers came through with riveting displays of creativity and commercial savvy. Here’s a quick rundown of the city’s buzziest shows: Mark Gong offered a riff on Carrie Bradshaw’s style, dressing his “Gong girls” in silky slips, cool cargos, and fabulous leather tailoring; Oude Waag’s Jingwei Yin went softer, draping timeless slinky sheaths while expanding his assortment of outerwear with cozy shearlings; Louis Shengtao Chen cleverly looked to streetwear silhouettes to balance his penchant for evening, while Yirantian Guo focused on dressing the working woman with sharp, versatile tailoring, also present at Jacques Wei, who complemented his more dressier options with easy knits and playful styling.
Scroll through to catch up on what you may have missed from Shanghai Fashion Week.
New China Style, Explained
Samuel Guì Yang returned to the runway this season with an off-calendar show. Yang has been christened as one of the leading voices in New Chinese Style, a movement that sees designers in China lean into Chinese sartorial traditions in order to offer a singular spin on their cultural identity. This trend follows the footsteps of a wider effort by the Chinese government to look inwards and restore national identity through the reappraisal of tradition. It has gained momentum in China for the way in which it so effortlessly cuts through the noise of Western aesthetics and pop culture. For fall, designers at SHFW looked at their own cultures to craft idiosyncratic spins on the movement, which is gaining momentum in retail. Yang’s collection beautifully merged East and West with bias cut silk qipaos and denim tang jackets, while Ao Yes designers Austin Wang and Yangson Liu crafted a cerebral vision for what they described as the “Oriental intellectual,” Yat Pit offered a contemporary wardrobe grounded in tradition, and Le Fame’s Nic Su leaned into his own theatrical flair for a sophisticated offering for the Shanghainese woman.
Vogue China Fashion Fund Winner Zhong Zixin Will Furnish Your Wardrobe
Zhong Zixin is the inaugural winner for the Vogue China Fashion Fund. She hosted her debut presentation during Paris Fashion Week, and we got to catch up in Shanghai as Vogue China kicked off the second edition of the Fund.
Zixin graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2018, and founded her label in 2021. Her parents used to run a furniture business, which informs much of her design vernacular. “They used a lot of bamboo and wood to make the furniture when I was growing up,” Zixin said, “so I like to combine bamboo weaving with wooden-like sculptures.” Apropos, Zixin trained as a sculptor before completing her graduate studies in London. Her fashion merges all of these influences to craft a uniquely contemporary vision of ready-to-wear that merges unconventional materials with timeless silhouettes.
As the first winner of the Fund, Zixin is looking forward to building out her fashion business, but is also looking to do more lifestyle and furniture as a part of her label. “Fashion is easier to produce than furniture,” she said, “but I like to repurpose furniture, so it’s something I’m looking to do more of so people know that we can live with our furniture for a long time.”
Le Fame’s Nic Sun Takes On Sophisticated Shanghainese Style
Le Fame is a staple at Shanghai Fashion Week. Last season, founder Nic Sun hosted his show outdoors, with models fashioned as sirens parading around fountains in a beautiful garden. For fall, he returned to the tents in Xintiandi to kick-off the official SHFW calendar.
Sun worked with the Vogue China Fashion Fund winner Zhong Zixin to create a “modern Shanghai trilogy” that worked as an anthology of the city’s singular style. He split his show into three segments: “Vanity Fair,” which featured sumptuous fabrics cut in ornamental, elegant silhouettes like embroidered lace separates and halter neck gowns; “Hunting Crush,” which saw Sun utilize pearls and laces to craft decadent eveningwear; and “Neo-Chinese,” which considered Chinese tradition in the context of today’s sophistication. Sun is at his best when he lets his theatrical touch take over, and here he merged this dramatic flair with Le Fame’s reputation for offering a solid. wardrobe staple
Lu Yan’s Comme Moi Blooms for Spring
Lu Yan started her modeling career back in 1999 and quickly became one of China’s first globally renowned models. For the past decade, however, she’s been off the runways and, instead, taken her discerning eye to making clothes; launching her label Comme Moi in 2013.
For her spring collection—Comme Moi shows in a see now, buy now cadence—Yan embraced her spring fever with a playful lineup. Feathery embellishments, luscious fringe dresses, minimal floral prints, and lotus flower-hems took the runway as the designer crafted a versatile wardrobe. Yan knows that her customer looks to her as both a style oracle and an inspiration, and this season she offered a lineup full of pieces women like her will be able to wear through their daily lives.
From New York to Shanghai with Weiraen’s WeiRan
WeiRan graduated from Parsons in 2022, launching her label, Weiraen, that very same year. This season she staged her runway debut at Shanghai Fashion Week, merging her experimental vision of outlandish silhouettes with a pragmatic and commercial offering that included sharp leather tailoring, vertiginously draped fringe, and some fabulously tech-y knits. WeiRan is also a digital artist, and in this collection she experimented with 3D-printed fabrications of her artwork. Having already dressed everyone from Lorde to Julia Fox, this season served to reinforce that she is a talent to watch.
Sifan Chen’s Menswear Balances Chaos and Restraint
This season saw the debut of Sifan Chen’s menswear label Chén Sifan. The designer explained that fall 2024 was about finding chaos in order—but there is nothing left to chance in their meticulously crafted menswear. Chen is one of Shanghai Fashion Week’s few menswear-focused talents, but their deftly tailored jackets and roomy-yet-weightless proportions make them a label menswear buffs should definitely look out for.
Yat Pit’s Hong Kong History Lesson
Hong Kong-based Jason Mui and On-Ying Lai’s Yat Pit, which translates from Cantonese as “one stroke,” looks at Chinese and Hong Kongese history to distill it into an easy, contemporary wardrobe. For fall, the design duo looked at the Hakka people, one of the four groups that inhabited Hong Kong prior to the British occupation. The Hakka lived in the island’s coastal areas, and wore practical, unadorned clothing that fit their farming lifestyle. Here, Mui and Lai zeroed in on this idea of simplicity with maxi skirts, easy separates, and their own contemporary version of the Hakka Liangmao hat.
A Melancholic, Romantic New World at Assignments
Ruoyi Hou has built a romantic world with her label Assignments. This season, the designer found inspiration in the second act of the classical ballet Giselle, looking at the figure of Giselle as a delicate, poetic beauty. For fall, Hou expanded her Assignments world past her intricately shirred and draped dresses, and into tailoring and easy knitwear. The results create a full-circle perspective of Hou as a designer: Equal parts romantic and pragmatic.
Judy Hua Bets on Texture
Judy Hua is another of Shanghai Fashion Week’s tentpole labels. The designer is adept at balancing a commercial offering with a more conceptual point of view, which this season saw her bet on texture. Compelling draped styles gave way to crinkled tailoring and wide-gauge knits. Hua draped quilted scarves around her models to create protective styles and playful new silhouettes that helped balance her more everyday propositions.