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Fashion month may be over in Europe, but across the world, Shanghai Fashion Week is well underway. On Saturday night, one of the city’s most talked-about young brands, Oude Waag, presented its Spring/Summer 2026 collection in retailer and incubator Labelhood’s new venue. Smoke filled the floor as models walked the runway to a pulsating soundtrack, dressed in the brand’s contour gowns, sharp tailoring and fluid one-shoulder dresses, the latter of which are draped by hand in response to the curves of the body.
“I always drape myself first. Like Rick Owens once said, everyone’s hand is different,” Jingwei Yin smiles, a few hours pre-show in a café below the venue. “I always start my collections from my own hand.” It might seem like an obvious approach, but in the generation of the ‘creative director’, designers are increasingly unable to cut or drape their own garments.
Yin founded Oude Waag in 2017, debuting at Shanghai Fashion Week for AW18. Like his Shanghai contemporaries Shushu Tong and Mark Gong, Yin grew up in Chengdu, a free-spirited city “full of artists”, the designer tells me. But his brand is unique in the Shanghai market, with a darker, sexier mood than the more coquettish or commercial labels on the schedule.
While this was a challenge at first, coming up in the age of streetwear, it’s slowly become a boon to the maturing label. After eight years of steady growth, Yin has built a seven-figure business, with 28 employees and 32 stockists including H Lorenzo and Selfridges. Sales grew 40 per cent year-on-year in 2025. And while he’s largely remained unknown in the West compared to his peers, with recent celebrity endorsements from the likes of Teyana Taylor, Megan Thee Stallion and Charlize Theron, as well as new European partners in sales and PR, the designer is cautiously taking aim at the Western market.
Yin graduated from his BA in fashion design at Central Saint Martins (CSM) in 2014. During his placement year, the designer honed his skills under Hussein Chalayan and Haider Ackermann, who each operated small ateliers to and cut and drape their own samples. “That doesn’t happen in bigger companies, but it helped me understand the pattern and how it came out as a product,” Yin explains. “Western bodies are more curved than Asian bodies, so I learnt about the relationship between fabric and the body.”
After his BA, Yin secured an interview for the CSM MA with legendary course leader Louise Wilson. But the day before the interview, Wilson sadly passed away, Yin says. “I felt kind of lost, so I took a gap year and moved to Paris.”
It was around 2016, which Yin calls “a weird period for fashion”. All of his heroes — from Helmut Lang to Martin Margiela — had quit the industry. In their place, Demna and Guram Gvasalia burst onto the scene with Vetements and its oversized streetwear, upending what luxury meant and redefining fashion. It went against everything Yin had been taught. “I love Belgian designers. I love tailoring, fabrics that speak to the body, texture and technique. So when Vetements went viral, I felt angry in a way,” he says. In Paris, Yin struggled to find a job, due to the challenging sociopolitical situation and his lack of French, so after a year, he went back to London and secured a place under award-winning tutor Zowie Broach at the Royal College of the Arts, to study his MA and eventually start his own brand.
Returning to China
When Yin finished his studies, Broach encouraged him to return to China to launch his label. At that time, there weren’t many independent Chinese brands operating to an international standard. “Broach encouraged me to bring it back to China, to take my Western education and root it in my own culture,” he says. “And I feel like she was right.”
In the beginning, it was tough. Ahead of his first show, Yin slept in his studio for seven days. He had just over 10 models and harnessed his network of young Shanghai creatives to pull it together. “The Chinese fashion community is rather small, and people help each other,” Yin says. “The stylist I worked with from three years ago, Liu Xiao, she’s now the creative director at large of Vogue China.”
Oude Waag’s first show was held in Labelhood. Yin had met Labelhood founder Tasha Liu during a his time at the RCA. Liu, like his tutor, had also encouraged him to return to China, and when he did, Labelhood became Oude Waag’s first stockist following the first show.
“Labelhood was the only [retailer] to speak to me back then,” Yin says. “I was next to Shushu/Tong and Xiao Li in the Tube showroom. My area was always empty,” Yin laughs. “Back then, the popular [silhouette] was extra large, streetwear, and I was doing bodysuits and leggings. It took three seasons for people to understand me.” In his second season, some concept stores came on board including Shanghai’s Common Place, and gradually, from 2018 to 2022, Yin scaled to 40 stockists across China, Asia-Pacific and key cities in the West.
Direct retail and steady growth
But like many Chinese designers, Oude Waag met serious headwinds when wholesale sales dwindled post-lockdown, as the Chinese market softened. Now, the brand has around 32 stockists, with 80 per cent of its business in China. In response to wholesale challenges, Yin invested in the brand’s direct-to-consumer (DTC) business, in order to mitigate losses. “Tasha [of Labelhood] encouraged me to start on [e-commerce platform] Tmall three years ago. We started last year, because we wanted to build up slowly and make sure everything we send out to customers is well prepared,” Yin says. Already, less than a year after launching its e-commerce, direct sales represent just over half of Oude Waag’s business. “I really didn’t expect that,” the designer says. But with a lower-end luxury price point (from €100 to €1,000) and a strong brand DNA, it chimes more readily with what consumers are seeking in the current climate. Higher-priced emerging brands are facing major challenges.
In wholesale, Oude Waag is selective about who it partners with, considering the current volatility of the market. “We don’t like quick money, even in the best market time, we don’t accept all the stores. Because around 2021, the local market was crazy, some of the brands went from like 30 to 80 [stockists]; we went from 20 to 40,” says Yin. “We really value how the buyers and the stores think of our brand. We want to build the longevity of the collaboration, rather than one season they buy a lot and the next they don’t.”
While known for its occasionwear, Oude Waag has a more commercial ready-to-wear collection of dresses and separates for wholesale, with less dramatic necklines, sheer elements and cutouts. Bigger stores like LA’s H Lorenzo will take both sides of the collection, says Oude Waag’s Madrid-based sales agent Sasha Krymova of sales agency Dear Progress, who Yin brought on two years ago to help with domestic and international sales.
Yin has long worked with Chinese KOLs, like actors Xin Zhilei and Song Jia, who helped boost his brand by wearing looks for events and resulting in surging Tmall sales, Yin says. Now, working with Paris-based PR David Siwicki, who partners with the likes of August Barron, Hodakova and Meryll Rogge, he’s increasingly gaining ground with celebrity dressing and building global awareness.
Oude Waag started a showroom in Paris two years ago, but “it wasn’t the best timing for the market”, Yin says. Now, the brand is considering going back to Paris for sales. “We grow slowly, and we decided to work with the best stores — we’re still developing that.”
“The key is not to overexpose at the moment, and be very careful and selective of the retailers we work well with,” says Krymova. There’s also growing interest from the Middle East, but, of course, there are some challenges. Yin and Krymova are considering adapting designs for the more modest consumer, while not compromising on the brand’s design philosophy. “The interest is definitely there, but we have to be quite delicate,” she says.
Instagram is another frontier than Yin is getting used to. It’s banned in China, but Siwicki and Krymova are encouraging the designer to post more on the platform, to reach Western audiences, particularly when celebrities wear and tag the brand. “I’m not a social media person, I try very hard to improve this part,” he says.
Of course, social media is yet another aspect to manage. As a Chinese brand, it’s difficult to build a team around you, Yin explains. Talented designers typically launch their brands in China, because there’s such a huge market for domestic players, or they remain abroad and work at major labels following their studies at further-afield schools like Parsons or CSM. It presents a challenge when scaling a label and trying to build a team, particularly now that Oude Waag is on Tmall, where brands are advised to drop new products every month.
For European labels, there’s plenty of talent to support brand founders and creative directors, so they can scale their businesses and increase their output, Yin adds. “We [have been] doing four seasons a year since last year, and it’s kind of hard for me. I think JW Anderson can do 18 collections a year because of the strong teams behind him,” he says. “I think the Chinese industry still needs to develop more.”
Yin would love to show in Paris one day; not just to scale his business, but to showcase the next generation of Chinese designers he’s part of. “I think every generation has a mission or goal,” he says. “I think for the last generation of Chinese brands, they could become very big commercial brands. For our generation, I think we really deserve to have some brands that are not only commercially successful, but really creative, in pushing the boundary of aesthetic and culture. I think our generation has this opportunity to change the shape of how other people understand Chinese designers.”
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
Correction: This story was updated to reflect Yin met Liu at the RCA. And the brand was initially sold in the Tube Showroom. A previous version of this story stated he met Liu in New York and was sold in the Lab Showroom.
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