A decade of change: Has China's independent designer boom come to an end?🥀 | Following the Yuan
Ten years ago, the biggest challenge for Chinese designers was visibility. Now, the challenge is saturation—of trends, platforms, pressures, and expectations—all amid the global economic slowdown.
Yaling’s note: China’s consumer market iterates so fast that it often feels like a luxury, or even a waste of time, for practitioners to pause and reflect. What Junjie captures here from an insider’s perspective mirrors my broader market observations: creativity is now being replaced by imitation, long-term vision replaced by short-term gains. The golden years of Chinese designers coincided with the consumption upgrade era, and the gloom, in part, can be partially explained by the stressed economic environment. But the bigger question now is: what’s next?
About the author: Junjie Wang is a seasoned fashion business reporter based in Hong Kong. Formerly the Senior China Editor at Vogue Business and Fashion Features Editor at Vogue Hong Kong, he brings years of experience covering fashion, retail, and lifestyle trends across China. [LinkedIn]
I still remember the feeling—Shanghai in spring, crisp air softened by city smog, the buzz of fashion week humming like an underground current. It was 2017, I was a student, fresh-faced and enchanted, booked a last-minute flight, and landed at Shanghai Fashion Week for the first time.
There were no front-row hierarchies for me. But I didn’t need them. The shows themselves sparked with electricity—Xu Zhi’s sculptural textures, Samuel Guì Yang’s age-defining neo-Chinese style, Angel Chen’s rebellious color, Ximon Lee’s underground edge, ShuShu/Tong’s sweet girlhood whimsy. Every designer carved out a distinct niche.
The energy was raw, defiant, and above all, creative.
Nearly a decade later, Shanghai Fashion Week has grown into Asia’s largest fashion event. Chinese designer labels have claimed their place, expanding into the offline retail space.
It’s something monumental—and undeniably worth celebrating. But the energy? It’s dimmed. Showrooms have grown larger, the market more crowded. Designers are savvier, but consumers feel increasingly distracted.
For this season, 2025 AW, I didn’t attend, but kept close tabs, speaking to buyers, designers, and organizers to piece together the mood. The scale, yes, turned bigger - many of the showrooms sprawled across larger venues, and a new lifestyle-focused platform, Notes Shanghai, was introduced, with brands specializing in fragrance and lifestyle products joining the fray in an effort to diversify beyond the saturated clothing market.
It’s also become more international. In an effort to offset the domestic slowdown, Shanghai Fashion Week leaned into global participation.
Mode Shanghai, one of the city’s major showrooms, introduced “Africa Reimagined,” and 57% of the brands this season were international. Ontimeshow, Tube Showroom, and Autumn Showroom all told me they had increased their roster of foreign labels—an observation I explored in a recent piece for T Magazine China.
Everything felt safe—more saleable collections, safer choices, more buyers, better sentiment, broader categories. The crowd had grown, but the stars were nowhere to be found.
It’s not that today’s designers lack talent.
On the contrary, many possess more technical finesse, global education, and commercial fluency than ever before. The problem isn’t the skill—it’s the air. Chinese fashion in the 2020s has entered what might be called a delicate stall. Brands are surviving. Some even thrive, business-wise. But few are emerging with the kind of cultural presence or aesthetic clarity that defined the last wave of breakout names.
Has the golden era of Chinese designers passed?
We often look back at the period between 2014 and 2016 as the dawn of China’s designer-label boom—a golden era marked by rising participation, growing market size, and burgeoning global recognition.
According to China Insights Consultancy, the market size of Chinese designer brands grew from 11.1 billion yuan in 2011 to 56.8 billion yuan by 2018, with a compound annual growth rate of 26.3%.
It was during these years that a handful of now-familiar names broke through: Xu Zhi, Angel Chen, Feng Chen Wang, Samuel Guì Yang, Shushu/Tong, Pronounce, Ximon Lee. But even they represent just a sliver of the broader scene that was taking shape.
While brands like Uma Wang and Qiu Hao had already emerged in the early 2000s, they did so along separate timelines—at a time when China’s fashion industry hadn’t yet reached the kind of industrialized infrastructure that would define the 2010s.
It was only then that a full ecosystem began to form: showrooms like Ontimeshow and Showroom Shanghai; incubators like Labelhood; a new generation of multi-brand boutiques; and, most importantly, a consumer base newly attuned to independent design.
Everything was in place.
So why hasn’t that momentum returned? Why haven’t we seen a new wave of labels with distinctive creative identities and international resonance?
Part of the answer lies in scale. A decade ago, there were simply fewer players. A small group of designers, freshly returned from overseas, armed with avant-garde visions and global perspectives, could easily stand out. I remember feeling the same way—struck by the newness, the clarity, the potential.
But today, the market is crowded. Everyone wants a share. And with the economy slowing, that early optimism has curdled into anxiety. Brands are no longer dreaming—they're surviving. And in survival mode, creativity often takes a back seat.
Still, not everyone sees this moment as a decline. My friend Lucrezia Seu, founder of Shanghai-based consultancy Plush Consulting, remains optimistic:
“The great thing about where we are now is that Chinese fashion independent design is not a novelty but it has become an intrinsic part of the industry,” she told me. “I believe the momentum has not cooled—if anything, it has evolved to being a vital part of the Chinese fashion industry and is now reaching a much bigger portion of consumers and audiences alike.”
If not cooling off, then the market for Chinese designers is tougher than ever
Yes, I agree with Seu to some extent. There are still glimmers of optimism.
And yet, I keep returning to a quieter truth: the deeper crisis facing Shanghai Fashion Week—and China’s independent designer market at large—is a crisis of excitement. If the early generation struggled with commercialization, today’s young designers face the opposite: over-commercialization.
Over-commercialization kills creativity.
Zhang Ying, founder of Not Showroom, once told Jiemian News that today’s ecosystem—driven by traffic platforms and algorithmic demands—pushes brands to chase sales momentum with limited resources, and it’s harder for designers to maintain their voices and creativity consistently.
But why has the industry arrived here?
To understand what’s changed, one has to understand what young designers are up against. In 2014, the biggest challenge was visibility. Now, the challenge is saturation—of trends, platforms, pressures, and expectations.
A designer launching today is expected to be an artist, an operator, and an influencer all at once. They must produce collection after collection, ride algorithmic waves, and navigate livestreams and D2C margins while safeguarding their creativity—all in a cooled-off economy.
“To gain the title of ‘iconic’ it takes time and market awareness,” said Seu. “Even if some brands get fast traction due to social media, it still takes effort to maintain that status. It is a difficult balance to stand out and gain following while building a sustainable business infrastructure to sustain consequent seasons, trend changes, and buyers’ preferences, as well as various economic challenges.”
Indeed, after the pandemic, the market briefly boomed. Consumers, driven by a mix of national pride and practical necessity, embraced local labels. Le Fame, for example, became a breakout, joining the “ten-million-yuan-a-season” club. But with success came pressure. Buyers expected repeatable hits. Designers, having once tasted scale, struggled to return to uncertainty.
Then the economy stuttered. Consumer confidence dropped. Budgets tightened. And just like that, the once-vibrant premium indie market began to contract.
In this newly risk-averse climate, the system began to eat its own tail. Buyers, under pressure, began to favor sure bets—reliable names, commercial silhouettes, trending aesthetics. In the past few seasons, Chinese designer brands have grown increasingly homogenous—offering New Chinese styles, quiet luxury minimalism, or Y2K “hot girl” aesthetics.
One buyer even confided to me that the sameness has dulled her appetite to place orders.
A structural weakness and a hard time for emerging talents
Part of the challenge is structural.
Shanghai Fashion Week inevitably follows the Big Four—New York, London, Milan, and Paris—by which point many international buyers have already committed their budgets. Since 2023, waning consumer confidence has further shrunk the premium designer segment, leaving brands increasingly anxious to generate immediate sales.
In the age of social media, brands chase viral success.
Märchen, among others, leveraged key opinion leaders (KOLs) and hit products to drive traffic and sales. As designers increasingly study online trends to shape their collections, originality sometimes gives way to market conformity.
“From the very beginning of starting a brand,” said Seu, “young designers understand that they need a standout piece that can be recognizable and easily sold online as well as given to KOLs for seeding.” She also noted how livestreaming has further compressed creativity, as “price point has to be carefully considered,” nudging designers toward safer, more commercial aesthetics.
This creates a vicious cycle: consumers spend less, buyers grow cautious, brands prioritize commercial designs, creativity erodes, consumer interest wanes further, and retail collapses under its own weight.
In trying to correct for the previous decade’s lack of business discipline, the market may have pushed too far in the other direction. Designers are now trained not just to design—but to sell, to adapt, to optimize. And while these skills are vital, they can also crowd out the slower, stranger process of artistic growth.
For emerging brands, breaking through this cycle is nearly impossible. Many last one or two seasons and vanish. Even well-connected names struggle.
Meanwhile, livestreaming platforms—once seen as democratizing tools—have become gatekeepers of their own. Bigger brands with more commercial potential get better placement, more influencer partnerships, and deeper discounts. And so, paradoxically, in an era where Chinese design is more visible than ever, its creative spirit feels increasingly constrained.
Glimmers in the gloom, perhaps
Yet not all is lost. If we look beyond the fashion week calendar and showroom walls, we see something stirring. A new curiosity, quieter but more grounded, is taking shape among young consumers. “There’s a design awakening happening in China,” Seu tells me. “Not just in fashion, but in space, object, lifestyle. People are rediscovering traditional craftsmanship, local materials, the slow art of making.”
In a piece I wrote for Vogue Business, I discovered a growing shift among young Chinese consumers—many of whom are seeking deeper connections to their cultural roots. This yearning has helped fuel China’s intangible cultural heritage (非遗) movement, which in turn has opened doors for a new generation of designers.
For local brands, it presents not just a branding strategy, but a point of emotional resonance. Designers who draw from traditional aesthetics, techniques, or narratives aren’t just crafting garments—they’re creating cultural continuity. One recent example is Ao Yes, a young label that taps into this very ethos, using local culture as a bridge between design and identity.
In this cultural moment, perhaps the definition of success must evolve. Not every designer needs to be a household name. Some may thrive in niche communities—yes, brands like Pet-tree-kor stand as an example—its success hasn’t come from chasing trends or courting celebrity, but from cultivating a slow-growing, values-driven community.
Some may build sustainable micro-businesses. Some may take longer, stranger routes.
For young talents, Seu advises that they can start small, but what’s more important is that they should build their own identity, tell their own story, forge their own aesthetics. “These things can be expressed in many different creative avenues that don’t necessarily have to translate into a fully formed team, studio, or production.” She said.
A distinct voice is exactly what we need today.
Maybe that’s what the next wave of Chinese designers will look like—not a tidal surge, but a field of small fires. Less spectacle, more signal. Less instant virality, more lasting resonance. 🔚
More voices in context:
In 2021, I penned a market outlook piece for Vogue Business on the business prospects of independent Chinese labels, for which, Nina Gong, a managing director who leads private equity firm Carlyle’s retail and consumer investments in China, said her team monitors Chinese designer brands online but will not explore backing any until they reach around RMB 400 million ($62.1 million) in sales.