Shushu/Tong certain is aware of how to attract a crowd. On Sunday night time at 10:30pm, there was a line for the second exhibiting of Liushu Lei (ShuShu) and Yutong Jiang (TongTong)’s fall 2024 assortment that wrapped across the block. The label has develop into one in all Shanghai Style Week’s top-billing names as its closing present, and it’s straightforward to see why.
The style incubator Labelhood, which hosts Shushu/Tong’s exhibits, places on a presentation for trade friends and one other for the general public. The label constantly attracts the most important quantity of requests from the general public, and its present tickets are the costliest within the resale black market. “Somebody as soon as broke into the workplace to take the tickets to promote them,” reported a publicist. In terms of Shushu/Tong, it’s actually that critical.
Besides that it actually isn’t.
“We needed to make one thing extra formal, extra elegant” mentioned ShuShu of his prissy ’50s and ’60s décolletages, discovered each in Vincent Minnelli’s 1958 Gigi and in Cecil Beaton’s images of those self same years, lots of them for Vogue. (Beaton additionally gained an Oscar for his costume work within the movie). The musical was the designers’ inspiration for this season. And whereas the movie stars Leslie Caron within the title function, the sophistication and contact of humor on this assortment was extra akin to Audrey Hepburn’s personal era-defining type. (Hepburn performed the function on Broadway in 1941.) The best way during which ShuShu and TongTong elegantly prolonged black turtlenecks with matching knitted balaclavas or fabulously styled basic grey buttoned cardigans and shirting below their most fantastically prim ballgowns felt like one thing Hepburn herself would possibly do—and possibly go viral on TikTok—have been she a recent actor.
A contemporary reappraisal of Gigi would discover it problematic for romanticizing what is actually a narrative of underage solicitation; however ShuShu and TongTong have been sensible to eschew the plot and focus as an alternative on the grandeur of its manufacturing and its ironic and humorous perspective on the class and effectively mannered-ness of the time. What made Gigi so compelling first as Collette’s novella after which as a movie was its mixture of spice and attraction, one thing this assortment has to spare.
The rising recognition of Shushu/Tong is partially because of the manner during which it so singularly captures a selected pocket of favor at this time; it’s dressy and complex in the best way 20-somethings see sartorial maturity, nevertheless it’s additionally playful, demure, horny, and regarded. The designers don’t merely throw on little bows on attire and sit of their ribbon laurels because the partial propellants of at this time’s ever-present coquette pattern. They develop on their world every season, elevating their fabrications and ingeniously updating their classics. See this assortment’s bodysuits embellished with scattered feathers, their molded A-line robes embroidered with each cutesy ribbon and fancy sequins, or how they’ve inserted bouquets of folded handkerchiefs or clusters of beads inside their signature open breast cup fabrications with a just-right contact of frisson.
“We needed to do one thing glamorous to conflict with one thing easy, possibly even naive,” mentioned TongTong after the present. Glamorous it was. “But it surely doesn’t look naive” interjected a mutual pal. “Precisely! She grew up,” answered the designer. ShuShu and TongTong at the moment are of their 30s, she mentioned, and subsequent yr marks the model’s tenth anniversary. “The woman grew up too!,” ShuShu added. What makes Shushu/Tong such a shiny star on Shanghai’s style firmament is the best way during which it takes even essentially the most passé—assume a musical like Gigi or a floral A-line robe—and makes it cool and fascinating. Romantic, mischievous; a bit frivolous, however all the time charming. That’s Gigi and, nonetheless after nearly ten years, Shushu/Tong.
