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Chinese fashion
LifestyleFashion & Beauty

Shanghai lockdown: fashion designers talk about uncertain future amid Covid-19 crisis

  • With Shanghai under lockdown and the Shanghai Fashion Week cancelled, we talk to four labels in the city to see how they are coping
  • Samuel Yang from Samuel Guì Yang, Shuting Qiu, Pronounce’s Yushan Li and Jun Zhou, and Sultry Virgin’s Qiuge Wang and Edge Xu share their experiences

Reading Time:5 minutes
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Shanghai’s lockdown has affected the city’s fashion designers, who talk about the cancelled Fashion Week and their hopes for the future. Above: designer Jun Zhou during lockdown.
Yaling Jiang
March and April are supposed to be busy times for designers in Shanghai as they prepare for Shanghai Fashion Week, which normally takes place in October and April. But with a Covid-19 flare up on March 1 and Shanghai entering a citywide lockdown a month later under China’s “dynamic zero Covid” strategy, some have found themselves under strict lockdown.
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Shanghai Fashion Week had been gaining momentum, largely thanks to Chinese consumers’ strong spending power and a growing army of Chinese designers.

What is unsettling is the waning consumer sentiment amid food shortages and overwhelmed medical resources. Spending on “wearable goods” declined by nearly 30 per cent in all categories in March, according to the Shanghai Municipal Statistics Bureau.

We talked to four Chinese designers who are regulars at Shanghai Fashion Week about how they are coping with the citywide lockdown, and their hopes and concerns for the future of Shanghai’s fashion industry.

Erik Litzén and Samuel Yang, partners in London and Shanghai-based brand Samuel Guì Yang.
Erik Litzén and Samuel Yang, partners in London and Shanghai-based brand Samuel Guì Yang.

Samuel Yang

The London-based co-founder of Samuel Guì Yang is used to hotel quarantine as he returns for fashion week every season. But this time is a little different for the designer, who is known to mix Chinese and Western cultural references. The brand he founded has participated in Shanghai Fashion Week since 2016.

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