Universe Building, Creative Resilience, and Blazy Influence at Shanghai Fashion Week

SHANGHAI – Local designers continued to push China‘s contemporary fashion scene forward at the fall 2026 edition of Shanghai Fashion Week, as the world’s second-largest economy starts to show early signs of a luxury rebound this year.

Some reinforced their brand identities, doubling down on storytelling and universe building, while the majority of the Shanghai designers showed business acumen, adapting the product mix and price point to market realities, with several of them borrowing from Matthieu Blazy’s debut show at Chanel: crisp shirts, big drop-waist skirts, and transparent bags spotted throughout the week, which wrapped on Tuesday.

The Shanghai Four – term first coined by WWD last fall – which includes Shushu/Tong, Oude Waag, Samuel Gui Yang, and Mark Gong, remained the major draw for global attention.

Leading the pack this time was Samuel Gui Yang.

His latest collection, titled “Dream Forward: Xin Jian,” reexamined the binaries of East and West, inner and outer worlds — proposing a renewed sense of intrigue and a new order.

The runway venue, hidden within narrow alleyways in Shanghai, was transformed into a dreamscape through softly draped paper curtains that diffused the light and blurred the boundaries between reality and stage.

Within this pseudo-domestic setting, stylized female characters — reminiscent of heroines from vintage TVB fantasy dramas — glided down the runway with an otherworldly ease. Their looks balanced irony and elegance — some wore feminine chef shoes — the kind easily found on Tmall for as little as 10 renminbi — while others stepped out in polished Manolo Blahnik heels.

They carried an eclectic mix of props, from old-fashioned blankets to sheer chiffon totes, imbuing the scene with a sense of playful surrealism. The effect was unmistakably cinematic — evoking the ethereal presence of a Chinese fairy, like the iconic Nie Xiaoqian from “A Chinese Ghost Story.”

For locals, the references were not as far-fetched, but for a global audience, the codes felt less obvious — “it was like reading signs that you don’t know the language to,” one editor remarked during a media scrum post-show.

For Samuel Yang and Erik Litzen, partners at the brand, a sense of disorientation only helps deepen the brand’s intrigue — a kind of ambiguity that feels right at home in contemporary art.

“It gives a narrative for people to imagine, it’s almost like seeing an artist’s painting, you are free to reflect on what you see,” said Yang.

A mixture of materials, including handmade paper, silk, and linen, helped move the “New Chinese style” narrative forward.

“If you are working with the more traditional styles, maybe you should push yourself with a certain fabrication, make sure it feels light and realistic for someone to wear,” said Litzen.

“And the use of color and print, we are always being asked, why are you into red? In a way, it’s very Chinese, but in another sense, red can have so many textures, it can be seen in so many ways,” added Yang.

Shushu/Tong, founded by Leiliu Shu and Yutong Jiang, sharpened its study of girlish tension for fall 2026 with a collection that filtered the 1930s Paris of the father-killing Violette Nozière through a slightly sinister lens.

The duo mined the era’s well put-together decorum, then quietly subverted it: drop-waist dresses festooned with feminine bows, off-shoulder necklines framing the collarbone, knotted straps, and ribbon-built 3D florals.

Lace and sailor collars introduced a frisson between primness and provocation, while the unveiling of its first official male range – and the brand’s first ever pair of trousers – broadened the drama. Knitwear, long a house strength, was pushed into new territory with bias cuts, diagonal stripes, and semi-sheer mohair, and detachable fur shoulders of many kinds heightened the impact.

“We always create kind of little evil [girls]. But this one is basically pure evil,” said Lei, relishing the character’s darker edge. Fabric served as the vehicle for storytelling. Green jacquards and gold velvet summoned bourgeois grandeur, while fractured florals hint at identity in pieces.

Jingwei Yin’s Oude Waag leaned into emotion for fall 2026. Rooted in a period of personal upheaval, the lineup meditated on loss, rupture, and the quiet work of renewal.

“This collection comes from a very personal experience. I went through a lot of struggle, but in the end, I found that to go forward is to accept whatever happens and let life flow,” Yin said after the show.

The show was a studied play of contradiction: fang-like spikes softened into laser-cut fringes, and sculptural, almost armor-like shoulders were paired with floating skirts in chiffon and weighted cupro that moved like water.

Yin’s long-standing fascination with the “complexity of women” anchored the season’s tension between softness and strength, with menswear codes appearing in tailored blazers and structured jackets, then were gentled through draping, jersey, and ultra-suede cut along the body’s curves.

“I always enjoy the tension between soft and strength. I tried to turn very aggressive, hard elements into the world of female strength,” he added.

Mark Gong said he has had enough of our gamified online dating world.

“I’ve been single for two years, I’ve been dating a lot, I’m always into the person that doesn’t like me, my friends think I have issues,” said the designer, whose latest collection reads like a Carrie Bradshaw column: “Can she play into fantasy, enjoy it, and keep a hand on the script?” the designer wrote in the show notes.

One of the hottest tickets in town – even Simon Porte Jacquemus was in the audience – Gong’s latest fall 2026 collection showed an “confrontational” version of the Gong girl, who’s single-maxxing and playing along to “situationships” — a word flirtatiously plastered on the rear of lace skirts that were paired with bombers, some fur, and peep-toe heels to give a va-va-vroom effect.

This was Gong’s version of “that Sabrina Carpenter” kind of girl. “She tastes like sugar, but there’s a knife hidden inside,” said Gong. “So spicy always.”

The Gong vixen is not afraid to play with colors. As the brand’s most vibrant collection yet, it’s filled with a palette of pink, purple, and bright green that leans fully into desire and visual pleasure.

“Something weird,” was how designer Jacques Wei described his latest collection that riffed on ’80s glamour.

The collection, filled with big hair, drop-waisted chiffon skirts, delicate lace, exotic fur, and animal prints topped with contrasting colors, paid tribute to a Helmut Newton-esque heroine that Wei says “commands a second look.”

“She’s a very sumptuous woman. She’s got a lot going on, a lot of different textures and patterns. She’s complex,” added Wei, who created high heels jointly with Daphne, a footwear company founded in Taiwan.

It’s been a decade since Feng Chen Wang started her eponymous brand. To mark the occasion in Shanghai, the designer staged a blow-out runway at the main Xintiandi venue that doubled as the formal debut of her women’s line as well as a retail pop-up near the Bund slated to last well into the summer.

Before her fall lineup, expanding on what she showed in Paris in January, the designer sent out dancers for a rousing performance set to a thumping deejay set. They wore Under Armour, but Wang demurred that she and the sports brand were “just having fun together.”

Then came a quartet of rolling installations evoking self-perception, her liberal use of plant dyes, the sports-style angle she’s been mining in her label, and collaborations that have included Nike and Converse – but also the raw feelings that emerged from her father’s cancer diagnosis during her years at the Royal College of Art.

All this did not distract from the sharp lineup she sent out, with table tennis champion Lin Gaoyuan and Hungarian-Chinese Olympian speed skaters Shaoang Liu and Shaolin Sandor Liu among her models.

The black, white, green palette and voluminous silhouettes she’s been developing since her days at RCA came alongside tailored jackets, roomy trousers, and the occasional skirt with utility pockets.

A new sensuality emerged from satins and tweeds used on outerwear, while subtle washes and textile manipulations, such as feathery effects, also hinted at the more upscale, craft-intensive offering she’s been developing.

Meanwhile, in the former Gibb, Livingston & Co. headquarters in Shanghai, Wang unfurled her retail vision, juxtaposing teas dating to her brand’s creation year and sourced in the Fujian region she hails from, antiques, and eye-catching furniture with her spring 2026 collection, rife with porcelain blues and greens on attractive denim, nylon blousons, and sharp tea-toned tailored blazers.

“Made in China” proclaimed the front of one sweatshirt. More than a full-circle moment, her Shanghai Fashion Week footprint offered a refresher on Wang’s evolution – and a tantalizing glimpse of what could come.

Designer Dayun Tang continued to follow the sun for the fall collection of his nine-year-old label Garçon by Garçon.

As the astral body journeys from East to West, a journey Tang described as a meeting between the ancient Chinese city of Dengfeng and Ancient Rome, the bird’s eye view yielded elements such as feathers, a smorgasbord of carpet motifs, and heaving baskets of produce left under each seat.

Tang also scattered mythological inspirations across believable contemporary options that could travel far beyond the Silk Road – or its Belt and Road successor.

These included boxy utility jackets with metal clasp closures, jackets with corduroy pocket flaps and collars, relaxed denim trousers, and heathered pullovers that wouldn’t look amiss in someone’s country house.

For the bold, there were flourishes of brocades and even gilded shearlings, but patchworks and embroidered motifs made up for easier fare. Given how many past versions of the latter were worn by show-goers and locals, this is what keeps wind under the brand’s wings in the long run.

In a city where the youth seems obsessed with cosplay, Short Sentence takes snippets of an unlikely main character, the Swedish cartoon character Pippi Longstocking, and makes a case for fun grown-up clothes.

“Silly and brave” is how Guan Lin, Short Sentence’s founder, characterized the collection, with a nostalgia-tinged color story that jumps between bright yellow, soft pink, retro green, and touches of blue to add playful contrasts — almost a redux of Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel.

“We want to be fun, be soft, look effortless, a sense of surprise would be nice,” said Guan, pointing to knitwear, the brand’s undisputed hero product, that came with rough edges and fringes, or a shrunken version with a twisted hemline.

“Pippi is using what she has lying around at home to create fashion,” said Guan. Last year, she branched out into home goods and loungewear with A Society of Home to great fanfare.

Checks and stripes, layered across denim jackets, padded coats, light puffer knitwear, and supersized paper clips, strike a balance between what’s accessible and the more formal and tailored, while staying true to the brand’s playful and crafty roots.

8on8‘s fall 2026 collection was conceived as a moody, cinematic study in duality, casting its wearer as a lone drifter moving between urban and surreal settings.

The brand’s founder Gong Li called it “Western floating wilderness,” where Tarantino-esque brutality meets fragile romance, translating that tension into clothes that splice trail gear with sharp tailoring.

Technical vests swell into sculpted, suit-like garments, while deconstructed details roughen up polished lines, keeping performance functionality intact but giving it a lived-in edge. Washed denim, eco-treated distressed leather, and matted faux fur rub up against airy technical fabrics.

A double-headed snail, whose shell forms a sideways 8, resembling the brand’s carry-over infinite motif, was seen across pieces via heat embossing, hand-beading, and nostalgic crochet, often entwined with eccentric florals and bud-like knit silhouettes.

Comme Moi’s fall 2026 collection reflected designer and former model Lu Yan’s free-spirited getaway in Senegal, where the rural surroundings reminded her of her childhood. Although she lived in a remote village in Jiangxi province with limited material means, she felt happy.

“With everything that’s going on in the world, I wanted to go back to that, help women find joy and comfort through fashion,” the designer said.

Continuing the brand’s urban-meet-resort aesthetic, earthy browns and mud-dyed surfaces evoking sun-faded walls and weathered pottery were realized in subtly irregular knits. Florals were treated with restraint: half-erased motifs printed on naturally wrinkled silk satin, giving the clothes an almost archaeological softness. The tote bags were terrific, inspired by local hats from her previous holiday in Colombia.

Susan Fang dug deeper into her ongoing air-themed cosmology at Shanghai Fashion Week, presenting the fall 2026 collection as a sugar-coated meditation on capitalism’s endless loop.

“Sometimes history seems to be repeating itself,” she said backstage, noting that infinity’s loop echoed “our super sweet desire for capitalism for a very, very long time.”

That tension between irresistible prettiness and unease played out in ’50s and ’60s silhouettes, vintage ski references, and Victorian bridal volumes, collaged with futuristic touches like her transparent Melissa collab shoes “that look like just floating flowers in the air.”

Lucky clovers and peach blossom motifs threaded through 3D-printed and laser-cut dresses were meant for auspicious blessings in dark times.

“We’re just wondering if it’s a time to question what caused this, but keeping a positive hope in mind will always cause much better things,” Fang said.

The star of the show belonged to a fully handmade butterfly dress whose resin wings caught the light as if untethered from the body. “We wanted it to look like it’s floating,” Fang added.

Given global geopolitical strife, who could fault Xu Zhi for invoking Allen Ginsberg, the Beat Generation, and the anti-war ideals of John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

The fall collection read like a sensual progression from martial ideals to sensual laissez-faire. First came outerwear in nubby wool that had a vaguely Napoleonic air with its asymmetrical gold buttoning and duffle-coat toggles on an A-line cape coat, married with his signature fringing.

Designer Xuzhi Chen mixed in furry elements and floaty layers, rife with flowing animal print and paisley ruffle dresses, building to an ensemble that had a boho vibe.

The Shuting Qiu woman turned serious this season. Consider a rather severe black jacket with a capelet and a navy knee-length coat with a stand-up collar, although this one was saved from turning too prim by puffs of chiffon at the shoulders and a wide sequinned hem.

This less decorative approach offered a reminder that underneath all her flourishes, the Antwerp-trained designer has a dab hand for structure and cut that allows her to experiment, as evidenced by a tailored jacket with curving lapel edges sloping into a soft peplum and gold buttons scattered across the front.

Fans of her more-is-more approach fear not, Qiu remains a maximalist at heart. There were plenty of exuberant details such as giant floral cascades for earrings and a textural collision or ten. It remained fun, flirty and felt like an easy in for those wanting to dabble rather than dive into the Shanghainese designer’s aesthetic.