At the halfway point of Shanghai Fashion Week on Thursday, designer Xu Zhi held a large-scale 10-year anniversary show, with a boho chic collection that riffed on the brand’s origins, featuring a reissue of the tasseled, tiered gowns from his first collection in 2015.
Zhi launched his brand from London, and found success quickly. “Ten years ago, I’d just graduated from Central Saint Martins and launched my brand immediately. I was one of the lucky ones,” the designer says. “My first season, I was picked up by Dover Street Market, Opening Ceremony and Lane Crawford. In 2016, I was nominated for the LVMH Prize [semi-finals]. It really was the best start for a designer you could imagine.”
At its peak around 2017/18, Xu Zhi was stocked at 100 international stores. But then, as the designer puts it, “the economy happened”. The pandemic hit, Zhi relocated to Shanghai and — unable to hold onto his Paris showroom or present in London — he lost his international store network and had to focus on the Chinese market.
The story is familiar for scores of Shanghai’s more established brands. Over the course of the pandemic (which affected China until 2022), Chinese designers including Zhi, Yirantian, 8ON8, Attempt and Staff Only were forced to pause their showrooms in New York, London, Milan or Paris indefinitely, shifting focus to the domestic market. Then, post-pandemic, China was hit hard by the global economic downturn, and luxury spending took a blow.
Today, Shanghai’s established designers are grappling with a new Chinese consumer, who is more price conscious, more discerning on quality, and requires versatility and comfort from their clothes. Here are the four dominant consumer trends they’re trying to meet.
The great casualisation
In recent years, Chinese labels have learnt a lot more about the domestic market and have adapted their categories and product offerings to meet consumers where they are, says Zemira Xu, founder of the Tube showroom. Tube is one of Shanghai’s leading sales showrooms, featuring some of the city’s fastest-growing labels, including Zhi, Jacques Wei and Mark Gong. As athleisure and then quiet luxury arrived during the pandemic, comfortable, casual fashion has taken hold in China over the last two years, designers agree. It’s a first for a luxury market previously dominated by bold, avant-garde and formal styles.
Ten-year-old label Yirantian was the first brand to be inducted into Shanghai retailer Labelhood’s Lab Showroom (then named Dong Liang) in 2014, after Labelhood founder Tasha Liu approached designer Guo Yirantian following her graduation from the London College of Fashion. Yirantian returned to Shanghai shortly after and built a robust womenswear business, focused on feminine, sophisticated workwear and eveningwear. In 2018, the brand had around 70 stockists globally. But since the pandemic, the designer relocated to Shanghai, and is now stocked in 40 Chinese stores.
Yirantian’s Autumn/Winter 2025 collection features more relaxed pieces for the first time, with separates, knitwear and sportswear, as well as her signature dresses and tailoring, using the same prints or colours across formal and casual garments. “We’re following the minds of the customers,” Yirantian says. “Our brand has always been feminine, or formal for the office woman, but after Covid, I think lots of people in China want a more relaxed lifestyle. So we added that to collections and created multiple versions of the same look, for different occasions.”
Versatility rules
Before the pandemic, 10-year-old brand Staff Only held presentations at Pitti Uomo and London Fashion Week Men’s (SS19), as well as a regular showroom in Paris. Today, two-thirds of Staff Only revenues come from China, with 30 domestic and 20 small international stockists. And the brand has found that versatility is crucial to capturing the Chinese shopper’s attention. When I visit co-founders Une Yea and Cory Cheng at the brand showroom, they are wearing looks from the new AW25 collection. Cheng sports a cropped, boxy brown jacket with a built-in, matching supersized tie, slung over one shoulder. The all-in-one piece is inspired by a shirt and tie look the brand originally showed in its debut collection in 2015. Elsewhere, the collection features reversible bombers, detachable elbow pads and mouldable ties, which the wearer can adjust “depending on their mood”.
“In recent years, we found the majority of clients were looking for quiet luxury. We are not in that category. But we want to create a solution: a combined look that is easy to wear, but still very stylish,” Cheng says. Chinese buyers want simplicity and ease, he adds. “The majority of buyers would ask, ‘How can I style this with this?’ because their customers are looking for some very easy solutions, while still having a very high standard. That’s why we created these layered all-in-one pieces.”
Menswear in flux
The streetwear boom uplifted the Chinese menswear market during the last decade, but in the last two years, the streetwear market has stalled, and menswear growth has slowed with it. In response, Chinese brands are pivoting to womenswear completely, creating specific women’s collections for China or updating their offering to move away from streetwear.
While Tube showroom founder Xu still wants to feature menswear, she has pivoted the men’s offering in recent years, adding local “urban living” labels like Tsubo, Uppervoid and Ankorau, as streetwear began to fade. “We respond to market trends, and focus on what the buyers are looking for,” she says. “Streetwear has been declining for over a year. So we cut in a lot of street fashion brands and then try to add some urban lifestyle [labels] instead.”
Luxury brand 8ON8 — which celebrates its 8th anniversary this year — is one of Shanghai Fashion Week’s most successful exports, with over 100 stockists across the globe and a showroom in Paris, which reopened shortly after Covid. While its menswear business is booming abroad, the brand creates womenswear specifically for the Chinese market in response to localised trends. “The menswear market is still very limited here,” designer Li Gong says, speaking from the brand’s vast studio within Shanghai’s Not Showroom. “We found women were buying the men’s pieces maybe more than men were, but the trouser sizing didn’t work, so we had to adapt.” Chiming with local trends, the brand also focuses more readily on casualwear, knitwear and jersey when selling to Chinese buyers, and its strawberry motif has become a signature logo in China (in the showroom, there are strawberry sweet filled jars, giant resin sweeties and strawberry signs made out of cardboard). There are also over 100 SKUs on display. “Since Covid, Chinese consumers want comfort, and Chinese buyers want a lot of options, so we make a big collection of casual pieces,” he says.
In the Labelhood showroom, several of the smaller brands started out in menswear but pivoted to womenswear to boost their growth potential, like three-year-old luxury label Ænrmòus, which focuses on sculptural, layered tailoring. “Now, we focus on menswear internationally and womenswear or unisex here, that’s the best way,” says Ænrmòus co-founder Kenneth Kwok Woon Yu. The brand also introduced more muted, earthy colour palettes to chime with the Chinese consumer, who experts agree are increasingly investing in greys and neutrals this season (in Europe, for now, customers prefer black).
Some labels have stuck to menswear, but refocused their efforts on quality and craft, rather than streetwear. Decade-old label Attempt started out selling contemporary-priced streetwear on Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao in 2015, and rapidly scaled, building a “very big” direct-to-consumer (DTC) community. But as the streetwear market slowed, and founder Liang Dong grew up (he’s now 34), the label underwent a rethink, pivoting to slower, more considered fashion, sold wholesale via Tube showroom. For the last two seasons, Dong has created contemporary menswear pieces, with some hand dyed using natural dyes from materials like pomegranate or ginger. And while the business has reduced in scale, his higher price point means revenues have remained stable, the designer says. “Consumers in China want connection today, they don’t just need more stuff, they want to know there’s a process behind the clothes, particularly in menswear.”
The social media shift
Since Zhi returned to China, he’s scaled to 100 stockists — but it’s been “all about e-commerce” for the brand, he says. The most important platform for sales is mass market platform Taobao, where Xu Zhi sells entry-level pieces like cardigans, for around RMB 2,000 (roughly $250). “We’ve had to adjust our products and create more entry-level pieces to fit that consumers, and it’s working well,” he says.
Today, Yirantian has a handful of “very small” stockists in Europe and 40 stockists in China. As a result, like the majority of designers Vogue Business interviewed for this story, she’s had to launch DTC e-commerce, to bolster her wholesale business.
“We’ve made some changes this year, and we now operate the business in two ways — one for wholesale and one for e-commerce,” the designer says. Yirantian now works with a lot of key opinion leaders (KOLs) on social media platform Red (aka Xiaohuongshu), the video and live-stream feed that’s exploded in China over the last two years, upending the Chinese social media landscape and accelerating the trend cycle, the way TikTok did in the West. On Red, KOLs regularly post videos or live stream wearing Yirantian looks, which are instantly shoppable. When I ask for an example, my Shanghai Fashion Week guide, Iraina Koo, quickly pulls out her phone and shows me her favourite creator twirling in a meadow in an all-white two piece, which she could purchase in two clicks. “On Red, consumers are more likely to buy a full look once they see a KOL wearing it,” Yirantian says, which is why she’s considering designing full-look matching products to serve this customer.
“Since Red, Chinese fashion trends are changing very fast, because now the influencers are live streaming with products every day,” Zhi adds. “There’s lots of micro-trends so it’s easy to hit a trend and catch the wave, but it’s also easy to fall behind. You need to adapt and think about your DNA.” Zhi’s collection was more bohemian than usual this season, aligning with the trend on Red (likely prompted by Chloé’s revival in the West, he notes). “We’re not normally a bohemian brand. But we’ve managed to add bohemian elements, like beading or fringing, which still align with our DNA.”
While the showrooms have already offered Shanghai Fashion Week attendees a good read on the season and the collections that will be shown over the weekend, the fashion week continues until Monday. And though the market remains challenging, local designers and showroom executives are optimistic about the future, as many of them tentatively eye the international market once more. “For now, we are focused on China,” Zhi says. “Going back to Europe is also in our plan. But when the time is right — not too soon.”
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