Re-Shaping Innovations in the Contemporary Fashion Show: Emerging Aesthetics and the Rising International-Based Chinese Designer Collective

Abstract

The past five years have seen a rapidly rising “new wave” of design power created by Chinese designers who are devoted to showcasing their works within the legitimate European fashion week system – which includes the “Big Four” fashion weeks in New York, London, Milan, and Paris – to upgrade their cultural status as Chinese design collectives. In addition to showing their collections with a high-end design standard, this group of visual innovators are constantly seeking aesthetic innovations when showing fashion and have gradually been changing and influencing the emerging generation of international-based Chinese designers by displaying and showing fashion at international fashion weeks. This paper integrates and investigates the new aesthetics in fashion visualization brought forward by a collective of emerging international-based Chinese designers who have gradually expanded their cultural influences and re-shaped innovations in contemporary fashion shows within the current global fashion ecosystem. These new aesthetics feature fashion’s new affinity with immersive physical theater, a type of avant-garde post-dramatic theatre, when being shown on a global stage. Furthermore, the rising institutions at Shanghai Fashion Week have been producing and advocating for the formation of international-based Chinese designer collectives to experiment with new aesthetics via multiple forms at London and Shanghai Fashion Weeks between 2017 and 2020, both physically and digitally. This has led to systematic changes and innovations in the global fashion cultural system, in terms of both forming and shaping a new aesthetic identity of Chinese designers within the global fashion system.