For years, Shanghai Fashion Week’s Labelhood has highlighted young and independent Chinese designers, elevating China’s fashion scene.
The leading fashion platform, which began life as ‘Dongliang,’ was founded in 2009 as a boutique store in Beijing with a prominent focus on Chinese designers. Later, in 2015, it launched the Dongliang One Day show during Shanghai Fashion Week for the first time.
Just one year after the debut of Dongliang One Day, the session turned into a satellite event within Shanghai Fashion Week and changed its name to Labelhood.
Since then, Labelhood has helped several emerging designer brands to grow significantly, including established brand Angel Chen, founded by young designer Chen Anqi, who came to the spotlight under Labelhood’s guidance, as well as designer brands like Yirantian, Chen Peng, and Ming Ma.
Labelhood's promotional poster for the upcoming 12th season. Image via Labelhood
When we speak of Labelhood, we think of young, fresh, and creative designers. As founder Tasha Liu once said in an interview, Labelhood gets more than 100 applications from young designers worldwide each season.
We witnessed several newcomers make their debut at Labelhood last season, including Ponder.er, Louis Shengtao Chen, fabric qorn, and Peng Tai. Among them, the model-turned-designer Chen Shengtao’s namesake brand won Shanghai Fashion Week’s best presentation award.
The mission of fabric qorn is inspired by Chinese grassroots aesthetics. Image via fabric qorn's WeChat
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Five brands that took part in the Youtopia project presented as aspiring talents last season, including Anno Mundi, Fivekoh, Momonary, Sorgenti, and Toile. This season, the Youtopia sector will work with international brand CONVERSE and the sustainable fashion lab R.I.S.E.
Newcomers enter the scene while old friends bid farewell to the stage.
Last season, some fashion fans were disappointed after a slew of renowned brands dropped out of the fashion event’s official schedule. Vogue Business China reported that some of Labelhood’s old partners, like Susan Fang, Ximon Lee, and Shuting Qiu, decided to stage their own shows instead of appearing at the prestigious fashion week.
Susan Fang’s presentation for the 2019 spring-summer season at Labelhood in 2018. Image via Susan Fang
These days, many coming-of-age designers are more eager to present their new collections independently.
Prior to this season’s Labelhood, the womenswear brand Ming Ma hosted a pre-fashion week show on September 26, with the designer confirming this sentiment to RADII, explaining that they “want to have their own space.”
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But there is some good news: Shanghai-based brand Deepmoss returns to Labelhood after its absence from the previous two seasons.
For a long time, Chinese designers have striven to redefine and reshape what is expected from the country’s design industry.
While some maintain a traditional sense of Chinese fashion by using dragon graphics and traditional motifs on garments, others, who became accustomed to international style at a young age, assert their freer and more personal voices on their designs. They do this by reflecting their own stories and backgrounds to convey a new era of Chinese fashion.
As China’s economy and the middle class have grown dramatically over the past few decades, and pride in domestic brands has also risen, Chinese designer brands are going bigger, with many deciding to stay in touch with their Chinese heritage.
Last season, nearly 20% of the designer brands on show emphasized Chinese traditional culture in their designs. This season, the trend looks set to continue, with brands like DONSEE 10 and Shushu/Tong on display, each of which tends to focus on Chinese culture.
A pop-up collection from Leslie Zhang and Yirantian’s collaboration was released in July at Labelhood. Image via Weibo
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Sustainable fashion has been a global phenomenon for quite some time, but in China, the idea of integrating sustainability into designs is increasingly popular.
Shaway Yeh, the founder of sustainability consulting agency Yehyehyeh and special advisor to Copenhagen Fashion Summit, is one of the pioneers of this type of fashion. Yeh brought her self-founded forum to Shanghai Fashion Week in 2017, with her aim to create conversation and raise awareness of sustainability in fashion in China.
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Yeh’s Shan Future Forum will again join this year’s Shanghai Fashion Week from October 12 to 13, with a theme of preserving biodiversity and respecting social diversity.
Shie Lyu's SS22 showcase. Photo by Junjie Wang
In China, sustainable fashion only became a trending topic after the pandemic outbreak in 2019. Earlier this year, Shanghai Fashion Week highlighted ‘green fashion’ as a key focus for the first time when its trade show Mode Shanghai launched a sustainability-focused exhibition titled ‘Fashion in Circulation.’
Compared to their international counterparts, however, Chinese fashion designers have a lot of ground to make up, as argued by local Chinese fashion media outlet Lady Max.
Catwalk fashion shows that last for 10 or 15 minutes still dominate the fashion week. These shows are considered the grand finale of a creative fashion collection and showcase a designer’s vision and a brand’s heritage.
However, traditional fashion shows face challenges, with innovative brands turning their attention from the runway to technology, incorporating digital elements into their promotions. For example, the luxury brand Balenciaga launched a video game alongside its 2021 fall collection.
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Virtual Angelababy Slays at Dior Show At Shanghai Fashion Week
A livestream fashion show that applies AR technology. Image via OurCity
The fashion week’s bold online experiment was done in partnership with Alibaba’s online shopping platform Tmall. It provided valuable lessons for future events, as the brands featured during Shanghai Fashion Week were not targeting a mass market — which is what Tmall is all about — and the event’s innovations failed to convert viewers into customers.
What we want and expect from this upcoming fashion week is an event that breaks the boundaries between virtual reality and reality, offering the audience more sensual and emotional possibilities and experiences.
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