Xu Zhi Shanghai Spring 2027

Reported by Vogue.

There is something quietly radical about staging a fashion show inside a 1926 Art Deco ballroom where the Jazz Age once threw its best parties. Xuzhi Chen of Xu Zhi understands this. For his Spring 2027 collection, presented at Shanghai's Okura Garden Hotel — a former French Club whose stained-glass dome still throws color like a kaleidoscope — he built an atmosphere that felt less like a runway and more like a haunting. Models moved in slow circles around live musicians; a harp solo dissolved into drums and keyboards, lyricism bleeding into something grittier. The mood was romantic and slightly dangerous, which, if you think about it, is the only kind of romance worth having.

Girlhood as a State of Mind

Chen titled the collection The Girls — and was deliberate about the fact that girlness, in his view, is a quality, not a gender. According to Vogue, the lineup moved fluidly between Victorian nightgowns, wired crinolines half-hidden under cascading fringe, pajama silhouettes, distressed denim, biker jackets, and military outerwear. Jacquard silk, lace inserts, delicate floral beadwork, and vintage prints gave everything the intimate texture of clothes pulled from someone else's wardrobe — the good kind of borrowed. The boys read androgynous and pale: shrunken tees, long swaying coats, lace shirts with boxer shorts riding above waistbands, lace-up ballet shoes softening the harder military shapes. It worked not because the contrast was forced, but because Chen never seemed to be making a point of it.

What kept this from tipping into costume territory was restraint. Chen's engagement with Chinese identity operates at the level of philosophy rather than ornament — no decorative motifs deployed as shorthand, but a genuine interest in the tension between fragility and strength, softness and resolve. He sees that balance as intrinsic to the Chinese spirit, and it showed. The Victorian bedroom and the grunge-era street coexisted without ceremony. East and West bled into each other with none of the self-consciousness that usually makes cultural fusion feel labored.

The real subject of the collection wasn't girlhood at all — it was vulnerability, and the quiet courage it takes to let it show. In a fashion moment obsessed with armor (the power blazer, the maximalist statement, the look-at-me silhouette), Chen made tenderness feel like the sharper choice.

When a designer can turn a ballroom séance into a genuine argument about what it means to feel things openly, that's not just good fashion — that's the whole point.

Read the original at Vogue.