In a Miu Miu Aesthetic-driven Market, Chinese Designers Strive for Change
SHANGHAI — This season, a handful of designers in Shanghai managed to stay true to their distinctive creative voices amid a challenging market, where many have succumbed to the overwhelmingly popular Miu Miu aesthetic and lowered prices to accommodate buyers’ shrinking budgets.
Fashion week headliners such as Comme Moi, Mark Gong, Oude Waag and Samuel Gui Yang continued to cement their market presences with standout runway shows but for many local designers, this season is when reality hit them hard in the face.
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With China’s economy flagging and the burst of the multibrand retail bubble, designers are pivoting toward more affordable, commercial pieces and showrooms are populated with trend-driven copycat labels.
For those that haven’t quietly disappeared amid the turmoil, the stakes are high.
Labels like Xuzhi Chen and Rui-Built are exploring new frontiers in home goods, while more established designers like Qiu Hao have their eyes set on the overseas market. This week, the label launched its first overseas pop-up at the luxury shopping mall Ginza Six in Tokyo.
However, Shanghai remains a crucial gathering ground for fashion insiders.
Edison Chen’s Clot returned to Shanghai and presented its latest Clot x Adidas Originals collection. Chen and models doubled as busboys, serving milk tea and pineapple buns at the intimate runway presentation inside a Hong Kong-style restaurant.
Elsewhere, retail events kept the local crowd on the move.
Schiaparelli, entering the Chinese market for the first time, launched a pop-up titled “Through the Keyhole” at the prestigious luxury mall Plaza 66. Fear of God’s new chief executive officer Bastien Daguzan on Friday will meet with the local community to introduce the Essentials line’s latest holiday drop and unveil Thunderbird, a China-exclusive capsule.
By the Bund, Paul Smith launched its latest flagship at the Fosun-owned BFC shopping mall. Dongliang, one of the first multibrand fashion boutiques in Shanghai that later migrated to Beijing, finally found its retail home in the market in a quiet, upscale neighborhood.
In Hangzhou, a quick two-hour drive away from Shanghai, Rick Owens and Michèle Lamy drew a hyped-up crowd to the retail emporium B1ock with the launch of “Brutally Graceful,” the cult designer’s first furniture exhibition in China.
The Hangzhou stop is a part of Owens’ China trip that also spans Beijing and finally, Shanghai, where he will be attending the Moncler “City of Genius” spectacle on Saturday, alongside A$AP Rocky, Willow Smith and Jil Sander.
Here, WWD singles out the 10 brands that stood out amid a tough market at Shanghai Fashion Week.
Comme Moi
Kicking off the nine-day showcase, model-turned-designer Lu Yan presented a collection that felt focused and confident. She offered a range of elevated wardrobe essentials that were both board room and date-night appropriate.
Her day-to-night choreography this time featured elegant houndstooth outerwear, dégradé fringed ensembles, shimmering crochet tops, statement coats adorned with floral chainmail patterns and an army of boss lady-approved, quiet luxury numbers in black, white, blue and red.
Jacques Wei
Shanghai-based designer Jacques Wei this time pared back the styling and grand narrative. Instead, he toyed with familiar elements — animal prints, lace, balloon dresses, contemporary art and traditional craft — and presented them in a light, joyful manner.
“I wanted to focus on what I truly love, going back to where I started,” Wei said backstage, adding that he wanted to present the collection in his new studio with an enviable view of the Shanghai skyline because a “farm-to-table” experience would be more intimate.
In addition to looks inspired by the Paris-based Chinese painter Site Fu’s surrealist work “Mr. Sandman,” the collection came with subtle nods to Chinese culture as well.
The floral decor seen on a silver fil coupé dress were velvet flowers done in a traditional style that’s unique to the region of Nanjing. The zen mode belts and necklaces came with artisanal monkey and horse ceramic figurines that were sourced from local households.
Wei also showed a white sleeveless top stitched with more than 300 metal pieces crafted with China’s centuries-old filigree inlay technique. It was coproduced by CHJ, a Cantonese jeweler, who will release a collaboration with Wei next month.
Mark Gong
Mark Gong’s spring 2025 collection was the final chapter of his “Sex and the City” trilogy, where he studied the character of Charlotte York and imagined what she would wear had the series taken place in 2024.
For an immersive experience, the designer arranged the show space as the character’s Upper East Side apartment.
Models walked through the kitchen, living room and bedroom, donning looks that started as well-to-do Swans — polka-dot sets, floral cardigans and gingham dresses, to name a few — but ended as liberated sexual beings in corsets, pussy bow ensembles, lace trimmed cropped shirts and see-through empress dresses, all in black.
“She was the most difficult one to do because she is very distant from what Mark Gong stands for. Growing up, she was my least favorite character. She represented the idea of the perfect woman at that time, believing in love and marriage. To me, this collection explores what’s next after Charlotte breaks free from that Upper East Side life, her reborn as an independent woman,” Gong explained post-show.
Gong said he is ready to embark on a new journey next season and has been toying with new ideas.
This season, he debuted a sneaker prototype with Adidas with 3D floral decor, a makeup collaboration with another Charlotte — Tilbury — and hired fresh faces to walk in the show. “This show meant so much to me but I am now ready to move on,” he added.
OfficeH
Supported by Chinese men’s tailoring giant Youngor, the Shanghai-based outdoor-inspired fashion label OfficeH made its Xintiandi debut with a collection that took a satirical look on at China’s 996 — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — work culture.
Suiting here became a symbol of exploitation. The brand’s designer Zewei Hong blew them up with ventilating fans at the back. “The collection is aimed at helping our friends stay composed and confident, even under the intense summer sun,” he added.
Hong’s smart approach to the collaboration not only proposed a fun, memorable sartorial proportion — adding a dash of playfulness to a genre that’s traditionally serious and uptight — but also seamlessly integrated OfficeH’s free-spirited outdoor ethos into tailoring. It’s hard enough to make a good suit, not to mention he did it with technical fabric.
Oude Waag
Oude Waag’s spring 2025 collection touched upon a topic deeply universal yet often regarded as taboo in China: death and funerals. After attending the funeral service of a relative who was a devout Christian, Oude Waag’s designer Jingwei Yin realized for the first time in his life how ritualized farewells can bring about a sense of profound spirituality, and comfort.
Yin’s spring 2025 collection included an actual Chinese hymn as its show note, which was a brave move on the designer’s part — religious content, despite its prevalence, has always existed under the radar in a largely atheist society.
To balance out the narrative, the designer also found a way to relate the niche topic to a more timely subject matter; Yin said he wanted to use the “Paramount Soul” collection to rethink “our world overwhelmed by information and materialism, which weighs down the soul.”
With fabrics and silhouettes light as a feather, the collection continued Yin’s study of sensual beauty. Highlights included billowy black caped gowns or mermaid dresses that were detachable from the swimsuit underneath, gentle body-con knits and draped slit dresses that twisted around the body dramatically.
Shushu/tong
“We finally have our own Miu Miu in Shanghai,” exclaimed one influencer at the Shushu/tong runway show, one of the hottest tickets in town and beloved by local Miu Miu fans. Despite surface-level similarities with Miu Miu, which has been pondering a dystopian future, Shushu/tong has been persistent with dreams of yore.
Inspired by the cult-favorite title “The Piano Teacher,” the Shushu/tong girls have decided to leave her doll house, explore adulthood, and learn to dress the part. Classic tea dresses, mini tulip skirts, layered cardigans and kitten heels, styled with nerdy oval-shaped glasses and bow tie-adorned clasp bags, felt poised and elegant almost to a fault. The prim and neat Shushu/tong girl might be working through some inner turmoil, but she’s not letting it show.
The brand, which has found success with monobrand stores in Shanghai and Hangzhou, as well as online, is now ready to win over the mass market.
Samuel Gui Yang
Samuel Gui Yang‘s runway show gathered all of the designer’s muses — his fashion and art world friends; industry mavens, such as Harrods’ Sarah Myler and Mo&Co’s Jenny Kim, and, interestingly, fashionable mother figures, including his very own.
Samuel Yang and Erik Litzén, the design duo behind Samuel Gui Yang, have always made an effort to nurture a personal relationship with show guests, which helps develop the brand’s grounded in the reality of the Chinese-speaking community and its global diaspora.
With a love of open-air show spaces, this time Yang and Litzén headed to the rooftop of Suhe Haus, a gallery space on the banks of Suzhou River, to showcase his latest “East-Wind” collection, which continued to explore the blend of Eastern and Western aesthetics.
East wind, which symbolizes good fortune, the power of transformation and the breath of spring in the local culture, was translated into the likes of crinkled poplin, washed sky-blue denim, and silky slips that flowed around the curves of the body, portraying a sense of ease and charisma.
Comfort was top of mind for the Chinese designer, as the brand rides the tailwind of change for its next stage of growth.
Joyce Bao
A recent graduate of Central Saint Martins, Joyce Bao presented her debut collection on the Labelhood stage in a small and intimate runway show that explored the delicate relationship between fragility and empowerment.
Drawing inspiration from Eastern and Western battle armor, Victorian Era lingerie and traditional Chinese garb, Bao’s designs were a gradual unveiling of a female character who knew what she wanted, valued comfort and preferred to look a little bit undone.
Ya Yi
Supported by Visa, the LVMH Prize-shortlisted designer, who was raised in Spain, presented a solid lineup that demonstrated her promising skill in fusing Western craft and Eastern sensibility in an elegant and feminine manner. The evening numbers with rolled-up sequin detail were a standout.
The show’s poetic dance performance, beginning with dancers breaking free from backlit boxes covered with Xuanzhi, premium Chinese paper made for painting and calligraphy, was even more impressive. Not even brands in Paris can pull something off like this so effortlessly.
J E Cai
London-based designer Jiaen Cai’s Xintiandi runway debut for his namesake label J E Cai, meanwhile, attracted the attention of an entirely different cohort of influencers: Xiaohongshu-famous dogs in the front row.
In addition to a softer and more delicate spring 2025 collection, where his modular fashion narrative — garments can be taken apart into pieces and reassembled as the wearer wishes with hooks and buttons — was less pronounced, he made adorable outfits for dogs of all sizes in collaboration with Plug-in Pet, a local brand that aims to cater to the everyday needs of urban dwelling dogs.
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