Shanghai Fashion Week: Everything You Need to Know

What actually happened at this season's fashion week, what changed, who came, and what they had to say.

More Than the Runway

Shanghai Fashion Week is now in its 13th year. Next to the world's big four fashion weeks, it looks very young. It began with nothing but shows by big international labels, then lost its sense of direction, and from its fifth year set out to find and nurture local designers. Today the organizers run the shows with practiced ease.

The week's schedule has five to seven shows a day. Chinese designers account for about 50% of them; the other half belong to commercial brands, international brands and student designers from fashion schools. DEEPMOSS, which shared a show with the buyer store Dongliang last season, staged its own show this time. Jicheng skipped fashion week and plans to present its new season in a short film. Dongliang, which organized a full day of shows for designer brands last year, also stayed away this year because it is preparing an event abroad in May. On the first and second days, though, designer brands that had taken part last season, such as BANXIAOXUE, C.J.YAO and FAKE NATOO, drew plenty of attention.

The biggest change from past editions is the addition of MODE Shanghai, an international apparel and accessories fair. The emphasis has moved from shows staged purely for display to helping brands with the downstream side of their business. This edition also added industry events such as the Haishang Forum and designer talks, as well as PREMIERE VISION, a fair for sourcing fabrics.

The organizers say that, to support Chinese designers, fashion week is now working on their downstream problems and will gradually extend into the upstream supply chain.

As spectators, though, what we care about most is the glamorous side. Yesterday the American trade paper WWD (Women's Wear Daily) wrote about several Chinese designers. The well-known fashion curator Gemma A. Williams has studied China's designer scene and published a book abroad called FASHION CHINA. Some buyers say this is a golden age for Chinese designers.

Here are some of the season's standout shows.

BANXIAOXUE: the collection includes womenswear and menswear, playing down gender while exploring the subtle relationship between the two.

FAKE NATOO: designer Zhang Na has long been interested in the relationship between people and their clothes, and between the wearer and her surroundings, and works personal, emotional traces into her clothes.

DEEPMOSS: designer Liu Xiaolu's work was selected for "The Image of the Times: Chinese Fashion Art Exhibition 1993-2012," shown at the Today Art Museum in Beijing, and later acquired by the China National Silk Museum.

JADE EN PLUS: in French the name means "jade and beyond." The label has a deep androgynous beauty: a designer womenswear brand free of constraints, with an international outlook, made for confident, mature, independent women.

Leather is the soul of MISSY SKINS.

YE'S: designer Ye Qian often draws on contemporary art and traditional Chinese culture. Her womenswear is consistently elegant and avant-garde; her menswear is simple, light and artistic.

What Does a Show Cost?

Most people have no idea.

Shanghai Fashion Week's shows run every day from afternoon into evening. The venues are split by size into Hall A and Hall B, and the fee a designer pays the organizers depends on the hall and the time slot, ranging from 60,000 to 120,000 yuan. That covers the venue, lighting, makeup and styling; photography and video cost a little extra. On top of this, brands pay for their own samples, models, show directors, PR and other costs.

The organizers say the fee is not entirely fixed. When applying, a designer brand must report its studio location, number of stores, portfolio and other details that show how commercial the brand is and how mature its work is. If the organizers think a designer is especially good, they may cut the venue fee or help find a sponsor. Designer brands already based at Xintiandi Style get a discount on the organizers' fee.

Asked how much a show helps and when a designer should stage one, Zeng Siyu of the well-known buyer store Bohe Nuomicong said: "A show only makes sense once a designer has found her position and sorted out production and the rest. Otherwise, the first time people see you, you're a cabbage; the next time you're a radish; the time after that you're bok choy. The industry will think the designer is fickle and not really ready. And if the supply chain has problems, a show may bring lots of exposure, but when buyers place orders and you can't fill them, it achieves nothing."

Still, a show can be a shortcut to overnight fame, though probably only for geniuses.

The Showroom Comes to China

The showroom is an imported idea that has only caught on in China in recent years. Put simply, it is a bridge between brands and buyers. It carries designers' work through to sales, making up for what fashion week lacks commercially, so that fashion can keep running as an industry.

A short-term ordering event like Shitang is called a trade show; a space like DFO that represents brands year-round is called a showroom. Showrooms pick brands differently: domestic or foreign, commercial or designer, high-priced or mid-to-low-end. Short-term events like Shitang live on rent; year-round showrooms mainly take a percentage of sales as commission.

The busier showrooms in Shanghai today, such as Shitang, DFO, ontimeshow and FDC, all opened only in the first half of last year, while T to the nth Power and BOTH are newcomers that appeared only this season. The Shanghai Fashion Week organizers also invited showrooms to take part and set up Mode as a place for buyers and brands to meet.

Tasha, founder of Dongliang, says the store orders its autumn-winter lines directly from designers, and some orders were already settled during Paris Fashion Week. They still visit domestic showrooms, but only to see how things are developing. So showrooms matter less to established buyer stores; newer buyers are their main customers.

We will publish a longer, more detailed piece on showrooms later.

They're Here to Shop

Fashion editors and fashionistas naturally don't miss an event like fashion week. They squeeze into the white tent at Taiping Lake Park in Xintiandi to be entertained, to do PR, and to file stories (that's us). Then there is another group, with serious faces and hurried steps, carrying stacks of photos and lookbooks from one showroom rack to the next. These are the buyers. Their main job at fashion week is to order what their stores will sell this autumn and winter.

Buyer stores in China have also only taken off in recent years, moving from blindly high prices to carving out niche markets. People in the trade, at home and abroad, once said China had no professional buyers, but any industry needs time to grow up.

Zeng Siyu of Bohe Nuomicong describes what a mature buyer needs. First, a feel for where the industry is heading, the ability to predict which designs may be popular next season or next year; this comes from homework, such as watching more shows and visiting more fabric fairs. Second, the ability to analyze data: "We did our homework before coming to the ordering event. We had worked out this season's budget, which brands to focus on, what colors we need, how much to spend at each price level, and how much stock to take of similar styles." "A buyer combines instinct with reason," she says.

What They're Saying

Liu Ying, media department, fashion week organizing committee: We will keep working to match supply and demand in the designer industry.

Zeng Siyu, operations director, Bohe Nuomicong: Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of American Vogue, put on a China-themed exhibition in New York that showed nothing but qipao. Someone asked whether Chinese design is now only qipao. Anna said she had not seen anything that expressed a Chinese design language, and until she did, qipao was all she could show.

Independent designer Zhang Da: The Chinese elements we see now are done very badly, but that doesn't mean Chinese elements are bad. Anything done the wrong way will look bad; done the right way, creatively, Chinese elements can work.

MI SHOWROOM: The market will have to be segmented. We'll push strong brands first, improve after-sales service, and watch what Chinese consumers will want. The market will get more and more niche.

Buyer Quinta: We do menswear, but domestic showrooms still carry far less menswear than womenswear.

Ye Qizheng, founder of DFO: The problem with Chinese designer brands is mainly the "three highs": high prices, high wholesale prices and high minimum orders. Foreign brands usually sell to stores at 40% of retail, with minimum orders of just 40,000 to 50,000 yuan. Chinese designers usually price a piece at 5,000 yuan, sell to buyers at 50% to 60% of that, and demand a minimum order of 200,000 yuan. That leaves retailers very thin margins. Operating costs in China are too high, and a buyer store has to mark prices up at least 3.5 times to survive in the long run. Who would dare bet on a new designer just out of school? This can only lead to a dead end.

Independent designer Shangguan Zhe: Preparing for fashion week is a fairly good route. It raises your profile and gets media and buyers to notice you. You can also build up gradually through existing buyers or by joining a showroom. The precondition, of course, is that the work itself is mature and appealing enough.

Imran Amed, founder of BoF: When choosing a buyer store, I suggest designers walk into the store themselves and get a feel for it: can you tell exactly what kind of person shops there? If you feel nothing, don't work with them. Look at the clothes in the store, too, and ask whether you can accept your work hanging next to them; if not, turn the deal down. Second, get to know the store well and make sure it will help build your brand rather than just put your goods on its shelves. Make sure it will help push your work to the media, PR people and customers. The last point is the most important: make sure the store will pay. It sounds simple, but I know brands that died outright because a store took their goods and never paid.

Lorenzo Hadar, founder of the Los Angeles buyer store H.LORENZO: When I come to China, I close my eyes and follow Tasha. Dongliang is the only buyer store in China I know. Compared with designers, buyers are more the ones who create trends. It isn't designers who tell the story; it's buyers who put different brands together and tell consumers a story with them.

BOTH Showroom: We don't carry Chinese designers for a simple reason: we want exclusives. Domestic designers' distribution channels are already largely in place, so the only thing we could do is a PR showroom, and we don't want to run that separately. The exceptions would be an ethnic Chinese designer based abroad, or, if we got lucky, a good new designer, in which case we would take the whole line.

Alter Showroom: The space Mode gave us is too small, so each brand shows only its signature look. Our own showroom has the full collections; this one is mainly to bring people in.

Jiang Hao of Sihe: Some designers don't show their full collection on the runway, because some pieces won't sell and are there only for the look of the show. Stores often carry more sellable versions, or related capsule collections.

T to the nth Power: We plan to become an incubator for Chinese designers: we will sign good designers, help them grow, and provide upstream support such as factories and fabrics.

Yuan Ze, professor at Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology: In Asia, brands named after their designers sell relatively poorly, but in the United States it's the opposite. That is a difference in cultural soil.

Zhou Rui, fashion brand strategist: A professional buyer should know, on seeing a garment, whether it suits her store and roughly how many she can sell in a month.

Independent designer Uma Wang: I don't deny the quality of China's cashmere and silk at all, but in some finishing processes we are still well behind Italy, such as washing and cold-dyeing cashmere.

Lin Jian, co-founder of Shitang: The customers for designer brands are people who used to wear LV. Now they feel too many people wear LV and it no longer marks status, so they have switched to designer brands, but they are still the same group with the same spending power. A showroom gives designers hands-on experience, and it also pushes them to get their goods made each season.

On time show: We only provide a platform, which is what we are good at. Buying is surely the buyer stores' specialty, and we generally don't advise them.

Tasha, founder of Dongliang: Designers who return after studying abroad face not only an unfamiliar business environment but many finer problems. Which factories can make clothes in one fabric and which can handle another? And if the order is small, the factory may not want it. Fabric has the same problem: China has good fabrics, but minimum orders are very high, while importers have lower minimums but high prices. By the time the whole collection is made, the retail price is very high.

Images in this article: Shanghai Fashion Week organizers, DFO