Shanghai Fashion Week S/S 2025

However, amidst it all, East Asia is still relevant in the fashion conversation, with Japan emerging as a strong player as a shopping destination for the Western clientele with its experimental stores. Tong from Shushu/Tong recalled a time thirty years ago when the country didn’t have access to fashion magazines. Miu Miu organised a ‘Select’ event in Tokyo with the Japanese singer Momo and released a special collection last year welcoming the Year of the Rabbit. Until a few years ago, no one was really covering Shanghai Fashion Week, and now Vivienne Westwood, Rick Owens, and Schiaparelli have ensured their presence in some format during the week.

As part of the showcase, there are initiatives like the Visa Creator Program, which launched this season, showcasing new faces—one of whom was Ya Yi Studio, the semi-finalist for the 2024 LVMH Prize, showing for the first time on the runway, looking at the craft and labour of artisans across cultures, associating Chinese rice paper to European lacemakers in designs that were reflected in smoothness and coarseness—accessorised with mediaeval headdresses, which is also a trend. Sustainability is becoming increasingly important for many designers in Shanghai and for the founder, Yayi Chen, too, who realised they were using scrap materials from previous collections in her current runways. “We used scrap materials to create flowers that had a more deconstructed feel,” she said.

Wang himself was showcasing as part of Labelhood, a retail experience showcasing Chinese labels, which is also a platform for incubating talent and taking designers to market—even collaborating with Machine-A and Pitti Uomo. Many designers have been returning to China after studying abroad, like Shushu and Tong, or Jingwei Yin of Oude Waag, the Yu Prize finalist last year, whose chiffon and satin dresses draped the figure like smoke, in waves of billowing grey and brown, after he was inspired by a Christian funeral. “The clothes are in a state as if they were growing out of the body,” he said. “This idea comes from the Eastern philosophy of Yin and Yang which are opposites and fluid. Combining western 3D pattern making techniques with oriental graphic pattern making is one of our practice's most apparent manifestations.” 

An intermingling of the Eastern and Western aesthetic was seen in many designers, including Ao Yes taking on the female boudoir, a space that has always captured the West’s literary and artistic imagination in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “We express the softness and subtlety of the East through modern techniques, conveying an elegant yet confident beauty,” said the co-founders, Austin Wang and Yansong Liu. From dogs on the runway to carrying multiple purses, here are ten designers who caught our eye.

The Shanghai-based designer Lin Guan has built a world of bright colours with Short Sentence, which she established in 2015, after graduating from Parsons with a second BFA in Fashion Design. A regular at Shanghai Fashion Week (SHFW) since 2015, for this collection she turned to the American artist Laura Splan’s soft polyester-filled installation of colourful antidepressants, titled Prozac, Thorazine, Zoloft (2000), which signified the widespread use of these pills in American households. “The inspiration comes from contemporary life,” she said, reflecting on turning towards mental health, “In an era of information overload, we often forget to focus on ourselves, even deliberately ignoring it—like the elephant in the room.” 

While Guan is typically inspired by the minimalism of modern art, this collection is all about dopamine dressing through an onslaught of colours and layering on shirts on shirts and skirts on pants—even through a cheeky trompe-l’oeil illusion of a jean jacket upon a white shirt. Guan brings the whimsicality of some ace indie sleaze styling by long-term collaborator Lemon H and Cathy Dong Yingyao —the Creative Director of W China, paired with the nostalgia of crochet knitwear, which she does so very well, one of her favourite materials being wool.

One of the breakout designers at SHFW, Hengdi Wang, just graduated with his Masters in Innovative Fashion at London College of Fashion earlier this year. Currently working with a small team and studio in Shanghai and colleagues in London, he started his namesake brand during the program, debuting with a small collection of jewellery, created using digital development technology. “My favourite part of design is making 3D models,” he gushed after the show, which explores the futuristic possibilities of the symbiotic yet conflicted relationship between humans, technology, and nature. 

A lifelong interest in science fiction films like Alien, Blade Runner, and Akira has infused in him a fascination for how bodies fuse with machines. “H. G. Giger’s artworks show how cold machinery could blend with warm organisms,” he mused. His interest in natural organisms was also nurtured during his time as a full-time fashion and accessory designer for Susan Fang. Exposed exoskeletons frame garments printed with animal patterns, while others with manual 3D convex pleating structured like a rhombus emulate winged arthropods. 

In one of the standout looks, the model’s body is completely draped in paper-thin pleated fabric, as if in an embryo, her hands folded as if asleep and waiting to be unleashed on to the world. “In his (Giger’s) manuscripts are many exposed exoskeletons, bones, and muscle shapes inside the human body that can be seen through the semi-transparent shell. These have inspired me to think about how to fold fabrics into the spinal or segmented, bone-like shapes and use wearable devices to reflect them or hide them under semi-transparent fabrics.”

Starting their brand towards the end of the pandemic year, the California College of Arts graduate Zewei Hong and the furniture designer Li Lai’s first collection in 2021 gave business casual in the mountains, paired with quirky add-ons like double zippered jackets. The next season they leaned more deliberately into going to the office combined with the utility of sportswear, which revealed itself in design elements like sleek jacket cutouts with white buttons sewn intermittently on their trousers, thrown in as a wildcard. 

Inflatables have been everywhere this year, with Rick Owens, Harri KS, Comme des Garçons, or Alaïa and Office H’s first showcase at SHFW threaded gorpcore by infusing cheekiness into their workwear, taking a white shirt and tie ideally meant for the hardcore corporate worker and pairing it with shorts. Blurring the boundaries between workwear and sportswear with some fun styling, Office H attempts to highlight our personas beyond work by creating functional clothing that seamlessly transitions from campy and comfortable workwear into functional street or activity wear—it has inbuilt fans, after all, to cool us down, in the office and outside. 

The youngest designer to showcase at NYFW, Mark Gong started his brand while he was still at Parsons and, for the past few years, has been a regular at Shanghai. Most of Gong’s recent collections have carried a subtext of the fetish in his tightly wound 3D-printed metallic bras and cheetah-printed underwear or through the act of being half-undressed, with sleek, dangling suspenders or underwear as officewear.

Alongside developing this collection, Gong shot dressed Kristen Davis for Rouge Fashion Book, playing with her character as Charlotte York from Sex and the City. His fascination with the series continues from the last collection, and here he delved into the cracks in the perfect fairy tale that Charlotte had thought she got before marrying Trey. Working with the ‘60s housewife silhouette—which was also a style frequently worn by Charlotte—Gong references some iconic moments in the show while also highlighting the fallacy of it all. 

Charlotte’s pregnancy polka dot dress is referenced in a printed skirt, styled prim and proper, except the blouse is unbuttoned to reveal the bra—or a jacket is used as a scarf, thus signifying rebellion through styling, which often visually borders on Miu Miu. A shirt printed with the words ‘Marry Me?’, accessorised with a couple of strings of pearls, is not pulled through down to the waist—thus revealing a tight corset underneath—time periods clash together to warn us that a fairy tale is not what we should be looking for.

Before moving on to Shanghai, Une Yea and Shimo Zhou had started their brand in London, after their respective studies in Accessory Design from RCA and menswear from LCF, their varied disciplines are reflected in their structured silhouettes, layered with cutouts and utility pockets, which become accessories stitched onto the garment itself, in many of their collections. “Our creative approach is shaped by our team’s diverse professional backgrounds,” said Yea, “Here we used photos of the models as textures, wrapping their images back onto their own garments—a technique inspired by digital aesthetics rather than traditional clothing design.” 

This achieves a rather playful approach to design, as seen in their current collection, inspired by errors in the digital landscape, which makes one suddenly realise the constructed nature of digitality. “Recent developments such as the deepfake incident in South Korea and the rapid advances in AI technology that enhance image clarity and persuasive power have revealed unsettling aspects of our digital capabilities,” said Zhou. 

These glitches are reflected in the garments themselves, through cowboy boots that look like extensions of jeans, pockets that hang haphazardly beyond the space they’re to be stitched in, trousers with garter-like suspenders that begin at the knee, or pants that don’t zip up fully, creating some delightful play with design and the way we see clothes. Rebellion is inherent in this, against what they term as the “pristine façade of digital capitalism,” and has indeed been seen in their previous collections, where they depicted procrastination as an important part of the process, going against time-bound, result-orientated capitalistic work systems. “We want to spark curiosity, encourage exploration, and keep things open to interpretation,” said Yea. “Humour allows us to approach serious topics and express ideas that might otherwise be constrained by traditional fashion norms.” 

Just founded last year by Lu Ping, Moution immediately had a London Fashion Week showcase in collaboration with Roksanda, styling their form-fitting athleisure with the latter’s eccentric swathes of abstract and brightly coloured garments. Form-fitting sportswear that looks and probably feels like a second skin is Moution’s speciality, within which they combine utility and design through knee-length hoodies that zip up right to your chin, possibly for harsher weather. 

The pandemic has heightened our connection with the outdoors, believes Ping, and Moution streamlines this transition—they even developed a “cooling-fresh ice titanium technology sun protection fabric” with ninety-eight percent UV blocking for their national swim team for the Paris Olympics.

This collection, showcased right after a Milan Week exhibition, touches upon the whimsicality of fashion through sportswear for the first time for Moution, with everything puffed up. With coats that dragged along the floor, designed like weighted blankets, or skirts with waffle-structured textures that looked like worry stone fidgets that could also function as a makeshift pillow for a pal wanting to catch a nap, Moution took a step into camp—even their underwear made with the same material, puffed up as the models walked down the runway. 

Launching his brand in 2010, CSM graduate Yang Fengrui has cemented his place in East Asian fashion as a designer who looks at the past, with both feet in the present. Taking traditional elements of Chinese clothing, like mandarin-collared and billowy robes, he transforms them into jackets or experiments with exquisite cuts and layering to create something completely contemporary—like a red slip dress amidst a primarily earth-toned collection taking from Liangzhu culture, the tint added to represent the red pottery of the period.

Movement has always been a Fengrui necessity, with swathes of fabric enveloping the models, making it seem almost bohemian. The boho chic, which filtered into his last collection, explored Chinese nationals out on adventures to explore their country through hats, boots, and rough cloth satchels, took flight in this collection accessorised with woven hats and bags and paired with wedges. 

Showcasing at Shanghai from this year, Annie Zhang started her brand in 2021, deconstruction being one of the most delectable elements in her clothes. For her autumn/winter ‘24 showcase, jackets and jeans were broken down to their very panel form—zippers dismantled the very shape of a jacket as it hung on the body. Zhang also inverts the purpose of a garment, with pinstripe trousers turned into an unfinished hoodie-coat, and plays with clothing design with zippers deliciously stopping a little above the inseam and white running-stitch that should be underneath, visibly runs in the front of a jacket’s lapel. 

The inception of this collection is meta—she references her first Shanghai show earlier this year and the moment of waiting with bated breath as the lights turned on and the insistent thump of the music matched everyone’s beating hearts. For her, it was a supernova, which suddenly burst out with the energy of creativity, and indeed this collection was swathes of deconstructed bursts of colours that trailed behind the models, with the post-apocalyptic futurism of silky-smooth metallic and sheer fabrics. The layering and grungy, shredded knitwear furthered the young and rebellious energy of the collection.

As someone growing up with a paint technician father, Angel Chen’s garments have always played with the arbitrariness of colours, their bright hues taking form in Impressionistic strokes or trippy hand-dyed pleats. Some of her best work has been taken from art, with waves like Hokusai’s woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa finding its way on her form-fitting tops. Chen has always been into the little details and transforming them into camp, like using shoelaces as hand accessories or a phone as a satchel bag in 2019—she was making bird handbags and lizard backpacks way before J. W. Anderson’s pigeon clutch. Furry shoes were part of her collections in 2018, much before they were seen repeatedly on the fall/winter runways this year—Chen seems to have lived through most trends before they even began. 

Her return to the Shanghai stage after a hiatus took the form of nomadism from the perspective of the Dragon Lady, or the Chinese female warrior, who had first been evoked in her fall/winter 2021 collection. Chen is also celebrating ten years of establishing her brand, and everything quintessentially Chen was brought in, especially deconstruction—from deconstructing jeans into mere strips to reconstructing a skirt from strips of denim. While taking from traditional Chinese narratives of moving tribes, she also delves into the trope of the cowboy, through the signature boots and massive extravagant belts, once again mingling Eastern and Western aesthetics—one of the sexiest ones gave a blue jean baby with a distressed and sequined denim jacket and oversized jean trousers. 

In nearly a decade of the brand, LCF graduates Liushu Lei and Yutong Jian, or Shushu and Tong, as they call themselves, have represented every phase of girlhood—be it the girl trying on grown-up clothes for the first time with a plunging neckline that goes right to her waist, or the one at a wild night out in sleep clothes that transform as outerwear when she should be at a sleepover. Their fascination with school uniforms when they were growing up takes the form of creating imaginary graduation photoshoots, eschewing the proportions of the uniforms, and substituting black pinstripes—usually meant for trousers—into the frock or using a simple bow as a penholder on the shirtfront. Adolescence also takes a Lolitaesque form through fetishistic belts transformed into bows or garters underneath a sheer chiffon evening dress. 

This collection, the Shushu/Tong girl who has since grown up from the last collection, is now going to the office—from their autumn/winter ‘19 collection Love Me or I’ll Kill You, filled with the angsty energy of the lovelorn adolescent, the georgette skirt and sweater-wearing young woman finds pleasure in rejection. Taking inspiration from the elusive nature of Erica’s relationship with rejection in The Piano Teacher, where she seeks to gain control of her life through it yet craves intimacy, the design was ideated, said Shushu, after the show. “Erika is filled with a despair that is intense and overflowing yet repressed and regulated. To convey this restrained intensity, we used clean, straight lines, especially around the shoulder and neckline, symbolising a suppressed everyday life,” she noted, “The rich colour palette is inspired by Erika’s complex and deeply charged inner world. 

Playing a game of reaching out and pulling away, conservative calf-length black skirts are styled with translucent chiffon shirts, or knee-length grey dresses step shy of being off-shoulder but reveal the collarbone, as the office girl steps out in a hairband and Mary Jane pointed heels. “For Shushu/Tong, exploring female sexuality means capturing its nuances and giving them form,” said Tong.