The Shanghai Fashion Designer Association, a relaunched initiative to fuel the next stage of growth for Chinese fashion designers, on Friday revealed the finalists for the inaugural New Wave Fashion Awards, with financial backing from Dior and Moncler.
Six designer brands — including Chen Sifan, Angus Chiang, Moto Guo, 8on8, Mayali, and Feng Chen Wang — will present their comprehensive brand expressions and creative ideas via holistic physical experiences during the fall 2026 edition of Shanghai Fashion Week at the end of March.
They were selected from around 40 candidates, who submitted applications in the past three months. Most of the six finalists have been in business for around a decade and have achieved various degrees of commercial success and global recognition.
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Winners of the three categories — creator of the year, public-voted creator, and creator with most commercial potential — will be revealed during an award ceremony and gala dinner on March 30, following a group of industry judges including members of the senior leadership teams at Dior and Moncler, designer Uma Wang and Labelhood founder Tasha Liu evaluating their presentations. Winners will take home a cash prize and industry mentorship.
The concept of the New Wave Fashion Awards was introduced last fall in a bid to turbocharge local creativity, nurture creative talent, and identify homegrown creative directors of tomorrow.
The award is looking to judge designers’ capabilities in areas such as product, aesthetics, space, narrative, and brand structure.
The Shanghai Fashion Designer Association will provide each finalist with funding for space, production and presentation, along with guidance from mentors during the process.
Lv Xiaolei, executive vice president of the Shanghai Fashion Designer Association and secretary general of the Shanghai Fashion Week Organizing Committee, said the award is part of the association’s ambition to build “a long-term, systematic, and future-oriented training mechanism to help China’s new generation of creative talents achieve leaps in continuous practice and move towards a clearer and more internationally oriented development direction.”
For the past 10-plus years, Lv has been responsible for repositioning Shanghai Fashion Week as a key industry event and a major trade and ordering platform in Asia. Its success has resulted in global fashion players taking part in, or planning their key China initiatives during, the biannual fashion showcase.
In addition to securing financial support from Dior and Moncler for the New Wave Fashion Awards, French luxury group Kering signed a memorandum of understanding with Shanghai Fashion Week to launch Kering CRAFT, which stands for Creative Residency for Artisanship, Fashion and Technology.
Billed as an industry first, the initiative is designed to spotlight, accelerate and elevate the next generation of Chinese creative talent, and to foster dialogue and exchange between China and Europe in design, craftsmanship, innovation and future business models.
Kering said the partnership reflects its long-term commitment to shared prosperity and sustainable growth across the global fashion ecosystem.
It’s understood that the Residency program will identify promising Chinese designers through a selection process led by an international jury of industry leaders and experts, also in collaboration with the Shanghai Fashion Designers Association.
