Yesterday, Maison Margiela climaxed Shanghai Fashion Week. In the same days, Kering, Dior, Moncler, Chanel and Ralph Lauren all made major moves toward China. Here is what is really going on.
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Masks everywhere! Models filed through a labyrinth of shipping containers, every one of them wearing a skull cap, a head stocking, or a mask, as Maison Margiela crowned its most ambitious cultural operation across China with a show on the closing day of Shanghai Fashion Week. Just days before, Kering had revealed the ten fellows of its new CRAFT residency for Chinese designers; Balenciaga had doubled the surface of its Guangzhou flagship; the inaugural New Wave Fashion Awards, backed financially by Dior and Moncler, had crowned its first winners; Chanel had announced that La Galerie du 19M would install itself at the Museum of Art Pudong this coming autumn; and Ralph Lauren had opened its first-ever flagship store in China, in Chengdu.
What made this week so striking was not the individual gestures but the timing. Since late February, the global luxury industry had been losing ground fast, battered by the outbreak of war in the Middle East. The region that had been luxury’s brightest performer in 2025, according to Bain, had gone dark almost overnight. None of the China initiatives announced that week were a response to this. They had been months in the making. But they now looked, in retrospect, like foresight.
Read the full analysis here: Reuben Attia’s Substack
