It’s not just fashion, but design for city’s precocious talent
Shanghai Fashion Week returns once more to the buzzing metropolis and offers a platform to China’s robust creative designers to showcase their talent.
Shanghai Fashion Week wrapped up last week after models strutted down the Xintiandi runway wearing Cabbeen’s spring/summer 2020 collection, inspired by space suit. The Chinese menswear label transformed the fashion week’s main venue into a fictional space base, showcasing a futuristic collection of sporty and worker-style designs that retained practicality.
The 11-day fashion week saw more than 100 runway shows, giving a kaleidoscopic presentation of the robust creative talent in the fashion industry, especially from homegrown independent designers. Statistics revealed that 1,200 fashion labels were on display in several showroom and trade show venues all over the city, with a record-high visit of 60,000 people in total.
“If today you only learn about designers and labels from magazines’ headlines, I highly suggest that you go to the showrooms of Ontimeshow or Showroom Shanghai, even Tmall or Taobao,” said Queennie Yang, editor director of Business of Fashion China. “Designers of all kinds are in bloom in China.”
A hotbed for China’s rising young designers, Labelhood this year set up its catwalk in a renovated barn at Minsheng Wharf on the East Bund, the Pudong New Area. Themed “Out of This World,” the four-day event saw promising Chinese talent present their latest designs, and an all-day market featuring workshops and a wide selection of lifestyle brands.
The highlights include a still presentation of Windowsen by Antwerp Fashion Department graduate Sensen Lii, which celebrates the sophisticated, sometimes even dramatic maximalism; the return of established menswear label Ximon Lee; and the emergence of fledging menswear labels such as Cornerstone, Garçon by Gçogcn and Roaringwild that showcase a well blend of style and utility.
“We’d like to break some rules and push the boundaries, to make fashion more democratic,” Tasha Liu, founder of Labelhood, told Shanghai Daily.
Four direct-to-consumer labels that kicked off on e-commerce platform Tmall are among the newcomers of this year’s Labelhood — one of them is S u p e rr. Launched on Tmall by Renee Wang in 2012, S u p e rr has built up a loyal customer base of 700,000. The brand’s open-to-public debut on Labelhood was fully packed, and the live streaming on Tmall clocked up 709,000 views.
“China is in need of fashion brands that can get closer to young people,” Liu said, adding that most brands are overlypriced for the general public, especially consumers from beyond first-and second-tier cities in China.
Some DTC pioneers, whereas, are carrying out attempts by “working on unforgotten products in very limited categories.”
Chinese designers learn better to go back to their roots for inspiration these years. Leaf Xia brought details of Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) costumes such as the loose sleeves and silhouette, and the floral motifs on silk products into her spring/summer collection.
Based on the underskirt of the Chinese qipao, Samuel Gui Yang develops its feminine designs with the tailoring techniques of vintage suits for men.
Saint Martin graduate, hat designer Zhang Tingting launched a workshop entitled “Rejuvenate” at Labelhood’s market, inviting the public to make hats of their own with dissembled shoemaking materials. Founder of the creative studio Neon Cloud Hat System, Zhang came to know of Putian City in late 2017.
The city in southeastern China’s Fujian Province is widely known as the factory of global sneaker-making. It started in the 1970s, and later became home to copycat shoes due to the low cost and efficiency in shoemaking.
Today, shoemakers in Putian have moved on to make hybrid sneakers, combining various parts of a dozen hot-sale models, like Yeezy, Air Jordan 1 and Li-Ning. By transforming dissembled Putian-made sneakers into hats, the social-concern creative project try to juxtapose “the symbols of public stereotypes (of Putian) and the real positive side of Putian shoemaking industry overshadowed by social bias, like its supreme techniques,” Zhang said.
‘More than fashion week’
A long-time partner with Shanghai Fashion Week and an experienced industry influencer, Liu believes that “Chinese designers have received unprecedented support from the local