Shanghai Fashion Week Gears Up for Full Return With Spring 2024 Edition
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LONDON — The spring 2024 edition of Shanghai Fashion Week is slated to be even busier than the event was before the pandemic.
Around 100 brands will present their spring 2024 collection across four official venues, and 13 official trade show partners will welcome buyers from around China, France, Vietnam and the U.S. to place orders for next spring.
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“Last March, we succeeded in starting with two Shanghai brands, Qiu Hao and Ming Ma. This time, we will bring three Vietnamese famous fashion influencers and TikTokers to promote the new Shanghai brands we will carry,” said a spokesperson from Runway Vietnam, a leading multibrand retailer with stores in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi.
Xiaolei Lv, secretary-general of the Shanghai Fashion Week Committee, said: “This season I will see many old friends from overseas coming back to Shanghai after a few years, as well as many fresh faces who will surprise us…”
“We are looking forward to the start of a new 20 years of Shanghai Fashion Week, and are even more motivated to think about what will be more important in the future of the fashion industry, and what will be the unique characteristics of young Chinese designers,” added Lv, who just returned to Shanghai from London over an official visit.
Chinese fashion label Icicle, the owner of Carven, will kick-start the nine-day showcase on Oct. 8 with a runway show at the Xintiandi official venue.
“Our Shanghai Fashion Week debut will mark the first time that the brand ever presents a collection within the fashion system. We hope to make it a professional one that can clearly showcase the vision of the new season, and by doing so, we can eventually figure out what’s the best way for Icicle to do a show in the years to come,” said Ye Shouzeng, founder of Icicle, who was inducted into France’s National Order of Merit earlier this year for his contribution to sustainability and artistic exchanges with France.
It will be followed by a packed calendar featuring buzzy local talents such as Tommy Zhong, WMWM, Staffonly, Yirantian, Haizhen Wang, The World Is Your Oyster, Mark Gong, Oude Waag, Swaying/knit, Ponder.er, Shie Lyu, Shushu/Tong, Xu Zhi, and power players like Edison Chen’s Clot, Mark Fairwhale, Chau Rising, Comme Moi, Cplus Series, Semir, and Balabala, one of China’s biggest kids’ clothing brands that launched a collaboration with Kris Van Assche last year.
Stella McCartney will make its Shanghai Fashion Week debut to close the showcase on Oct. 16 with a repeat show of the spring 2024 women’s collection, to be first revealed in Paris later this week. A secret collaboration will be revealed upon this occasion as well.
The brand will also launch the “Future of Fashion” exhibition simultaneously at the former site of the Chinese American Bank of Commerce on the Bund the same day.
The exhibition will be based on the installation first revealed at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow during COP 26, highlighting sustainable materials the brand has been using in its collections, such as pieces made from Bolt Threads’ Mylo mycelium leather, vegan football (soccer) boots created in collaboration with Paul Pogba and Adidas by Stella McCartney, and Evrnu NuCycl and Econyl regenerated nylon sourced from post-consumer waste and ocean plastics.
Anchor events are back this season as well.
The Harrods Hive, an incubator program first introduced in 2021, will make its return to Shanghai at the newly opened luxury shopping complex Zhangyuan. The latest edition will be the third stop after Beijing and Dubai. Afterward, the event will head to Saudi Arabia.
Michael Ward, managing director at Harrods, said the event will “focus on innovation in the world of luxury and gives the next generation of talent the opportunity to meet and connect with experienced industry leaders, shaping the future of fashion and the luxury market.”
“We are also soon to be opening the doors to our first private members club, The Residence, a unique proposition in Shanghai created to serve a curated community of discerning members. Registration has been extremely popular since we announced the club in July, and we are excited to soon be welcoming members through the doors,” he added.
Together, Kering and innovation platform Plug and Play China will announce the winners of the third annual Kering Generation Award at the Museum of Art Pudong on the last day of Shanghai Fashion Week. This edition focuses on three dimensions: circular raw materials, circular product designs and circular business models.
Marie-Claire Daveu, chief sustainability and institutional affairs officer at Kering, noted that: “Kering and sustainability share a long history, and we believe our role as a luxury group is to actively contribute to accelerating change. By choosing the circular economy as the key focal point of the third Kering Generation Award, we want to help a new generation of start-ups explore and implement innovations that can drive the full-chain industry transformation.”
Veteran fashion editor and sustainability advocate Shaway Yeh’s Shan Future Forum is set to make a comeback as well with a half-day program at Fotografiska Shanghai under the theme “Rewilding/Rewiring Fashion.”
“Rewilding is one of the most prominent topics in the discussion of sustainable fashion today. It transforms the linear fashion production and consumption model into a renewable culture of use, making and remaking. Rewiring, on the other hand, employs digital technologies to reconstruct and redesign the fashion system. I believe that by eliminating the conventional practices of extraction, the new fashion system is regenerative and circular, incorporating local and technological approaches to production and design,” said Yeh.
Key speakers at the event will include Christelle Capdupuy, sustainable development director at Louis Vuitton; Andrea Rosso, brand sustainability ambassador at Diesel; Tana Dai, general manager at Erdos Cashmere Group, and Yang Liu, general manager at the partnership development center of Alibaba’s Tmall Business Group.
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