Xuzhi Chen is Shanghai’s resident boho spokesman. At first look, his spring 2026 assortment—his second since his large return to the Shanghai Style Week fold final season—regarded as if it had been engineered to accompany the style dictionary’s entry on boho-chic, checking each field with its wispy clothes, ballooning pantaloons, and diaphanous silk blouses. However as he defined within the lead as much as the present, Chen was getting at one thing deeper and extra romantic.
He cited the French poet Arthur Rimbaud as an inspiration, however quite than deal with his risky early years and his torrid affair with Paul Verlaine he was occupied with his later days. After spending his youth within the arts, main a precarious, vagabond-like life with Verlaine, Rimbaud left his profession as a author and started travelling extensively. He traversed Europe, totally on foot, and have become a soldier to discover Indonesia, then the Dutch East Indies, ultimately settling in Yemen. On his runway, Chen thought-about what Rimbaud might need discovered throughout his travels.
To his credit score, quite than a melange of disparate parts, what Chen conjured was a way of wanderlust. On the womenswear entrance, he supplied some good clothes and embellished each blouses and clothes with cascades of ruffles, which he paired with both trousers—denims or tailor-made, the previous not all the time efficiently—and flouncy skirts. His boho imaginative and prescient was most clearly realized in his menswear: three-piece fits had been minimize amply however not outsized in fairly silk brocades and styled both shirtless or with blouses and, right here and there, a pantaloon—and all the time accessorized with sandals. Tremendous short-shorts helped add sharpness to the softness of different appears to be like, and amped up the intercourse enchantment of the gathering total. There was an air of idiosyncrasy to his males’s appears to be like that the designer ought to leverage throughout his full assortment. The story Chen instructed felt as if Rimbaud had taken up touring to not transfer on from his writing, however to doc it as a poet.
