On the occasion of Shanghai Fashion Week, SHUSHU/TONG, one of the best-known emerging Chinese brands to date,especially among the very young, walked the runway yesterday. Based right in Shanghai, the brand was founded in 2015 by Liushu Lei and Yutong Jiang, designers trained at the London College of Fashion with previous experience at Simone Rocha and Gareth Pugh. Over time, the two designers have built a recognizable language made of original silhouettes, curated tailoring and hyper-feminine details, such as ruffles, bows or bell-shaped dresses paired with jaunty-cut fits, balancing childlike femininity and contemporary irreverence.
The brand has acted as a bit of a generational bridge between the more than established aesthetics of brands like Simone Rocha, for example, and emerging brands like Sandy Liang, positioning itself as one of the first brands capable of clearing this naive femininity before its exploit in the various trends like ballet core or lolita, seen depopulating among Gen z the past few years.
With its Fall/Winter 2026 collection entitled The Invented Self, SHUSHU/TONG further evolves its imagery. The brand’s codes remain recognizable, but are crossed by a subtle sense of disorder and artificial construction-a play of contrasts that reminds me very directly of the aesthetic tensions explored by Miuccia Prada for Miu Miu. Femininity, while remaining central, becomes less spontaneous and more constructed, almost performative, introducing a new dimension of “disguise” hitherto less evident in the brand.
On the runway, this translates into more complex layering and a greater presence of mature, bourgeois elements: skirt-blazer suits overlaid with jersey pullovers, knee-length dresses with 1950s silhouettes, and retro-flavored gloves, handbags, and caps. Bows and tartans coexist with low-top sporty shoes, while fur details among epaulettes and stoles add textural depth and again suggest a more vintage cut. Stirrup leggings emerge as a key element for the women’s wardrobe, while the men’s proposal remains more linear, played on soft pants paired with shirts and sweaters, playing more on color contrast than on particular cuts.
The result that emerges from the collection is that of a more mature femininity: the somewhat jaunty little girl of the early days has now become less naive, more adult, more aware of her own dress. Boyish romanticism is now translated into a sketched gentility, hyper-feminine traits are found in accessories with an old-fashioned taste, while contemporaneity emerges in a few details, which I found, however, less playful or irreverent.
[đź“· Instagram: shushu__tong]
