Shushu/Tong sure knows how to draw a crowd. On Sunday evening at 10:30 p.m., a line for the second showing of Liushu Lei (ShuShu) and Yutong Jiang (TongTong)’s Fall 2024 collection wrapped around the block. The label became one of the most successful names of Shanghai Fashion Week during the closing show, and it’s easy to see why.
The fashion incubator Labelhood, which hosts the Shushu/Tong shows, will host a presentation for industry guests and another for the public. The label consistently attracts the largest number of requests from the public, and the tickets for the shows are the most expensive on the black market for resale. “Someone once broke into the office to take the tickets and sell them,” reported a publicist. When it comes to Shushu/Tong, it’s really that serious.
Except it really isn’t.
“We wanted to make something more formal and elegant,” ShuShu said of his prudish cleavage from the ’50s and ’60s, both found in Vincent Minnelli’s 1958 clothes. Gigi and in Cecil Beaton’s photographs from the same years, many of them Fashion. (Beaton also won an Oscar for his costume work in the film). The musical was the inspiration for the designers for this season. And although the film stars Leslie Caron in the title role, the sophistication and touch of humor in this collection were more akin to Audrey Hepburn’s own era-defining style. (Hepburn played the role on Broadway in 1941.) The way ShuShu and TongTong elegantly extended black turtlenecks with matching knitted balaclavas or fantastically designed classic gray button-up cardigans and shirts under their most fantastically polished ball gowns felt like something Hepburn himself could do. do — and probably go viral on TikTok — if she were a contemporary actor.
A modern reappraisal of Gigi would find it problematic to romanticize what is essentially a story about soliciting minors; but ShuShu and TongTong were smart to avoid the plot and instead focus on the grandeur of the production and the ironic and humorous perspective on the elegance and the good. manners of the time. What made Gigi So compelling, first as Collette’s novella and then as a film, was the combination of grit and charm, something this collection has to offer.
The growing popularity of Shushu/Tong is partly due to the way it captures a certain style of style in such a unique way today; it’s chic and sophisticated, the way twenty-somethings see sartorial maturity, but it’s also playful, understated, sexy and considered. The designers don’t simply throw little bows on dresses and sit in their ribbons as the partial drivers of the current, ever-present coquette trend. Each season they expand their world, taking their fiction to the next level and ingeniously updating their classics. Check out the bodysuits from this collection adorned with scattered feathers, their contoured A-line dresses embroidered with both cute ribbon and pretty sequins, or how they tucked bouquets of folded handkerchiefs or clusters of beads into their signature open breast cup constructions for a just-right fit . touch of frisson.
“We wanted to do something glamorous that clashed with something simple, maybe even naive,” TongTong said after the show. It was glamorous. “But it doesn’t look naive,” a mutual friend interjected. “Exactly! She’s grown up,” the designer replied. ShuShu and TongTong are now in their 30s, she said, and next year the brand will celebrate its 10th anniversary. “The girl has grown up too!” ShuShu added. What Shushu/ Tong such a bright star in Shanghai’s fashion firmament is the way even the most passé – think of a musical like Gigi or a floral A-line dress – and makes it cool and desirable. Romantic, naughty; a bit frivolous, but always charming. That is Gigi and, still after almost a decade, Shushu/Tong.
