The Dispatch From Shanghai Fashion Week

In Shanghai, the Fall/Winter season arrived as a kind of reintroduction—a city dancing with its heritage while plunging headfirst into texture, contrast, and dramatic silhouette.

With heavyweight Maison Margiela staging its show among towering shipping containers on April Fools’ Day, to Chinese mainstays like Shushu/Tong dabbling in 1930s Parisian girlishness with a rebellious streak, the collections delivered nostalgia, femininity, and spectacle. Below, discover the Shanghai Fashion Week highlights that confirm what many already know: Shanghai’s fashion scene isn’t slowing down. 

MAISON MARGIELA

Staging the house’s first-ever show outside of Paris, Glenn Martens’ Fall 2026 debut marked a defining moment of the week. In a couture-driven collision of ready-to-wear and the Artisanal line, the Maison looks to its origins while recalibrating them for a global stage, where conceptual craftsmanship is both reframed and expanded.

Set within the after-hours haze of a Parisian flea market, the collection unfolds as a world unto itself, blurring the boundaries between the real and the imagined. Garments are deconstructed and reassembled with intent: tailoring finds frayed and painted finishes, while second-skin jerseys are heightened alongside trench coats and weighty tweeds. The porcelain doll archetype is taken off the shelf again, emerging as both material and illusion, rendered through layered organza and fractured surfaces pieced back onto the body. Elsewhere, distressed tapestries, Edwardian silhouettes, and timeworn dresses evoke an almost spectral presence (or lack thereof).

An army of face masks, a house signature, reinforces a sense of feminine concealment while anchoring the collection in Martin Margiela’s enduring language of anonymity.

The result channels the Maison’s intrinsic subversion, pushing it toward an almost self-aware exaggeration—where the avant-garde leans into provocation.

 

FENG CHEN WANG

Another heavy hitter, Creative Director Feng Chen Wang marks a decade in motion with a milestone showing that feels as expansive as it is personal. Titled “Two as One,” fashion meets performance, installation, and sound as the designer explores the dualities that have long defined her work.

After playing with genderless fashion earlier this season in Paris, the collection debuts the brand’s first complete womenswear offering. With the formal introduction of the category, both menswear and womenswear mirror one another on the runway, styled in pairs to underscore a  kind of discourse, while subtle divergences emerge. Softer, fluid knits and silk coats are punctuated by sharp suiting and an architectural edge.

At its core, the collection references Wang’s Central Saint Martins graduate collection, now revisited with a more distinctive clarity. Deconstruction remains a guiding force, where raw edges, tonal irregularities, and fabric manipulations speak to the beauty of imperfection.

Staged across five immersive environments—from a live workshop to a bedroom homage—the show blurs the line between the intimacies of process and the polish of presentation. Ten years in, Wang doesn’t just revisit her codes, but expands them, creating a space where strength and softness not only coexist but embrace.

 

SHUSHU/TONG

Homegrown creative duo Liushu Lei and Yutong Jiang turn inward with “The Invented Self,” a collection that examines the transient nature of girlhood as it stretches into womanhood—all while grappling with class, family expectations, desire, and sense of self. Inspired by the story of Violette Nozière, the 18-year-old Parisian woman who poisoned her parents after alleging years of abuse in 1933, fashion here becomes both costume and confession. 

Green jacquards, gold velvet, and faux fur waist cinchers and capes evoke inherited wealth and old-world opulence, while diamond argyle knit dresses and brimmed-hat-inspired headbands imply a restrained social code. Crinkled pastels and recurring bows, however, speak to innocence, also resembling an armor that covers the brewing emotional ruptures underneath. 

Models walked across a cobalt blue carpet scattered with ornate pink flowers, sharply contrasted by gold walls and fast tempo music that suggests a busy life being lived somewhere offstage. The friction between polish and transgression runs through the entire collection: the woman in stirrup tights carrying the classic handbag—you don’t quite know where she’s going, but you want to find out.

 

SUSAN FANG

Creative Director Susan Fang’s “Air-Infinity” returned to her unmistakably dreamlike visual language with a new sense of levity. A luminous, ethereal orchestra of bows bobbed around, while ribbons trailed like streamers caught in a breeze. Clouds of white, pink, lilac, and pale blue, and ballerina silhouettes appeared throughout the collection. 

After leaping to the future through a nature-technology lens in her Spring/Summer collection, Fang lingers closer to the present this season, while borrowing from the past with 1950s and 60s silhouettes and oversized vintage ski jackets. 

In partnership with Bambu Lab, Fang also debuted a 3D-printed shoe in multiple color ways—guests could watch pairs being printed in real time before the show began—demonstrating that even grace and reverie can be engineered and replicated. Her signature bubble beading returned, with each bead sewn individually by hand to build a crystalline, dimensional surface that catches the light like dewdrops. 

At the show, a bulbous, billowing purple wave was suspended above the runway, soft and monumental all at once. Fang’s world remains one where sweetness is never simple, recognizable but never predictable.