Shushu/Tong closes Shanghai Fashion Week with a collection that rewrites the brand's ten-year trajectory. Liushu Lei and Yutong Jiang built their reputation on a specific kind of femininity. The collections were girlish and precise. Bows appeared on structured blazers. Lace trimmed coats cut with military severity. The tension between softness and sharpness was the point. This season, the duality deepens into something more complex. The Inventive Self filters 1930s Paris through a sharp contemporary lens. What emerges is a brand at a new moment in its evolution.
The inspiration draws from Violette Noziere, a working-class Parisian woman bound by societal constraints in the interwar period. She moved through the world constrained by circumstance and expectation. The collection translates this constraint into silhouette. Drop-waist dresses arrive with knotted shoulders that shift the weight of fabric. Undulating trims catch light and movement. Bow detailing punctuates the most structured pieces. The effect is neither fully primped nor fully provocative. It exists in the tension between both.
The knitwear represents the collection's most decisive shift. What was once a supporting player becomes central. Mohair in semi-sheer weights appears alongside bias-cut constructions and diagonal striping. The pieces move differently from what came before. They breathe. They suggest the body rather than defining it. The girlish precision that characterized previous seasons persists, but it now sits alongside a new generosity of proportion.
New Territory
The Fall 2026 collection introduces menswear for the first time. The brand's first pair of trousers appears in this collection. Both feel inevitable rather than exploratory. The tailoring methodology extends naturally from the womenswear. The proportions shift. The precision remains. A menswear suit appears constructed with the same attention to surface texture as a dress. The restraint is absolute.
Three-dimensional florals appear across several pieces, preserving the girlish attitude that remains core to the Shushu/Tong identity. Yet these flowers coexist with detachable fur shoulders that suggest power and volume. Lace and sailor collars create tension between primness and provocation. Every choice feels considered. Nothing appears accidental. The brand has spent a decade refining a specific sensibility. This season proves how much depth exists within that refinement.
The brand has moved from girlish precision into something more complex and layered. The tension is still present, but it speaks to a deeper understanding of how constraints shape invention.
Juliette MarchandThe Shanghai Fashion Week schedule ran from March 25 through April 1. The city showed a generation of designers at a particular moment of maturity. Several brands on the programme are celebrating significant anniversaries. Samuel Gui Yang presented work that continues its exploration of knitwear and architecture. Feng Chen Wang showed menswear for the first time, marking a ten-year evolution of its own. Mark Gong refined its colour vocabulary. Oude Waag pushed sculptural volume into new territories.
Precision and girlish sensibility remain core to the brand's identity. Details matter.
The closing show at Labelhood represents more than a chronological endpoint. The platform stages emerging talent alongside more established figures. This positioning reflects Shanghai's evolution as a fashion capital. The city is no longer a satellite orbiting European centres. It functions as a source. The designers showing here understand Western technical training. They studied in London, Antwerp, Paris. They returned to Shanghai to build something entirely their own.
Maison Margiela presented its Autumn/Winter 2026 collection in Shanghai during the same week. The house staged a runway show alongside exhibitions and an open-access digital archive called MaisonMargiela/folders. The initiative signals a substantial shift in how global luxury houses engage with fashion weeks outside the established four cities. Shanghai's energy and audience now justify mainline presentations. The city draws international brands seeking growth. It offers something rarer: a genuine cultural event where collectors, curators, and architects sit alongside commercial buyers.
Shushu/Tong's tenth anniversary collection marks the moment when the brand's vocabulary has deepened enough to contain contradictions. The girlish precision persists. The sharp edges remain. Yet now there is room for generosity. There is complexity. There is invention. Ten years into the project, the label has learned how to express something more nuanced than the binary it once inhabited. The result is a collection that feels complete not because it abandons what came before, but because it has finally found the language to expand it.