Fashion Week: MODE's Cross-Border Reach in Evidence

At the Shanghai Fashion Week, the runway may draw the cameras, but much of the business happens a few kilometers away.

At MODE Shanghai in Hongqiao area, racks of clothes sit in front of buyers rather than audiences, and the questions are less about spectacle than about price, delivery, distribution and whether a brand can travel beyond its home market.

The Spring/Summer 2027 edition of MODE opened this week. More than half of the brands taking part are from overseas, while 10 showrooms are participating. Buyers attending include Galeries Lafayette, Italy's ANTONIOLI, New York's 3NY, Vietnam's RUNWAY and Saks Fifth Avenue in Kazakhstan.

The numbers underline a commercial role Shanghai Fashion Week has spent more than a decade building. Launched in 2015 as its official trade show, MODE was designed to connect brands with buyers and orders; what is becoming more visible is the platform's cross-border reach.

For Chinese brands looking overseas, that matters. Rather than first building their own retail networks abroad, they can use Shanghai to meet international buyers and test whether a design language developed at home can survive the less glamorous demands of wholesale: differentiation, price, production and delivery.

For EP YAYING, there is already some evidence that the model can work.

The Chinese womenswear brand said contacts made at the previous MODE fair led to orders from buyers in Kazakhstan and Vietnam. Interest from Southeast Asian buyers has also helped it expand its distribution channels in Malaysia, where the company is exploring multi-brand stores before potentially moving into department-store counters.

For Chinese brands trying to expand abroad, the question is no longer simply whether international buyers are interested in Chinese design. It is what they are actually willing to buy.

"Buyers travel around the world, so the first thing they look for is something that cannot easily be replicated, something that is not homogeneous," said Jasper Liu, Brand Director at EP YAYING. "Distinctive craftsmanship and details are the first consideration, while value for money and price come next."

That calculation complicates the long-running effort by Chinese fashion brands to turn cultural references into an international selling point. Silk, embroidery and other recognizably Chinese elements may help a collection stand apart, but cultural storytelling alone is unlikely to secure an order if the product does not fit a buyer's price point or commercial mix.

But MODE is not only a platform for Chinese brands going out. It is also drawing overseas labels looking in.

Seven independent designer brands – SANGMIN, HAPPY YOGIS, The Author, Rosymare, POUM, L.AIMANT and IDONISM from Daegu Fashion Lab, one of South Korea's major textile and fashion centers – are appearing together at MODE for the first time this season. The group has set a combined contract target of about US$200,000 during the fair.

The South Korean brands, however, do not plan to reshape themselves simply to suit Chinese tastes.

"Shanghai has become a very fashionable city," said Ken Ahn, CEO of Daegu Fashion Lab.

Rather than designing specifically for Chinese consumers, the group wants each label to preserve its own aesthetic identity, Ahn said. "The Chinese market is large but diverse, with consumers looking for very different styles rather than conforming to a single taste," he added.

The CEO also noticed buyers moving between Asian trade fairs. Some buyers previously encountered at fashion exhibitions in South Korea appeared again in Shanghai, suggesting that the region's buying network is becoming increasingly interconnected.

That cross-border movement can expose sharp differences in what buyers want.

One of the more unusual exhibitors at MODE is a 14-year-old designer Mikhail Nikolsky from Russia, who founded his designer brand 3DS at 11. The collection he brought to Shanghai is characterized by minimalism, relaxed silhouettes, and motifs and textures inspired by nature.

"Russian buyers are looking more for commerce and some utility wear, while Chinese buyers are looking for something conceptual and the construction," he explained.

For Nikolsky, MODE is as much a place to get professional feedback as it is to chase immediate sales. "Buyers are important for us," he said, "but mostly I want to get feedback from the professionals."

His presence also illustrates the tension that runs through much of the fair: how to balance creative identity with commercial viability.

For young labels, the challenge is deciding how much to adapt to market demand without becoming indistinguishable from competitors. For more established companies, the issue is increasingly whether creative work can be integrated into a much larger product and business system.

Anta's relationship with Chinese designer Chen Peng offers one example. Their ANTA ICONIC collaboration can be traced to 2023, with the Peace Dove capsule following in 2024. Their partnership has since expanded into the Anta Shanghai Design Center-Chen Peng Studio, established last month.

What sets the partnership apart is the extent to which the designer is being integrated into the sports equipment giant's product and commercial system.

"Our way of working together has changed," Chen said. "The earlier partnership had already extended into merchandise planning and the business side of the brand. Future cooperation will reach further into creative strategy and product development."

The current plan involves four product lines and five IP projects to be developed through Anta's Shanghai operation and put into mass production.

Anta and the ICONIC line were participating in the Shanghai Fashion Week trade-show circuit for the first time this season, displaying products developed over the past four years alongside new items intended for retail stores.

That marks a broader evolution in how large Chinese fashion and sportswear groups work with designers.

Designer collaborations have often been treated as short-lived marketing events, a way for a mass-market company to borrow cultural cachet from a creative name. The Anta model points toward something more structural: bringing designers into product planning, commercial development and ultimately mass production.

It is also the commercial logic MODE is built around.

The harder measure of success is becoming more concrete: whether a buyer places an order, whether that order develops into a repeat distribution relationship, and whether a creative idea can survive pricing, manufacturing and scale.

For brands on both sides of the table, being seen in Shanghai is increasingly only the beginning.