Shanghai’s independent fashion scene has entered a more demanding stage. Clear creative identity must now convert into sellable products, repeat customers, credible wholesale doors, and cultural reach beyond China. SHUSHU/TONG stands out because all four parts are visible in its current business.
The label marked its tenth anniversary in 2025. During the same year, Vogue reported that it had grown 5 percent to 60 stores in the prior season. Its Spring 2026 show closed Shanghai Fashion Week, while a 2025 ASICS footwear partnership carried its codes into global sneaker culture. Vogue’s October 2025 industry review places the brand among Shanghai labels scaling across Asia and the West.
What Makes SHUSHU/TONG a Distinctive Shanghai Fashion Brand?
Liushu Lei and Yutong Jiang founded the label in Shanghai in 2015. Both grew up in Chengdu, studied in Shanghai, completed a women’s wear MA at London College of Fashion, and worked with the teams of Simone Rocha and Gareth Pugh. They returned to Shanghai to develop the joint brand named after their nicknames.
That route helps explain the label’s fluency. London supplied rigorous womenswear training and exposure to two sharply defined design worlds. Shanghai gave the founders a base close to production, local fashion communities, and an audience comfortable mixing Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Western references. A 2025 L’Officiel profile linked the brand’s rise to its interpretation of girlish style and precise tailoring.
This combination gives the Chinese designer brand a clear position. Its identity comes from emotional tension and disciplined construction. Literal heritage motifs play little role in its current visual language.
How SHUSHU/TONG Built a Commercial Language From Subversive Femininity
The brand’s strongest asset is visual memory. Bows, ruffles, lace, floral prints, Peter Pan collars, fitted shapes, and pleated skirts return as recognizable codes. Structured tailoring, leather, visible lingerie, and sharper proportions give those codes adult agency.
For shoppers, a SHUSHU/TONG dress is the clearest entry into that world. Search demand also clusters around a SHUSHU TONG white dress, SHUSHU TONG skirt, SHUSHU TONG cardigan, and SHUSHU TONG top. This category ladder has commercial value. Statement dresses drive imagery and celebrity dressing. Knitwear and separates support more frequent wear.
Vogue’s Fall 2025 review featured a broader wardrobe that included capri pants, easy-knit twin sets, cropped tops, and micro shorts. The expansion gave customers more ways to participate in the brand and preserved its signature. The aesthetic remains consistent across dramatic runway pieces and easier daily products.
Oversized bows, defined waistlines, and sharp skirt shapes remain legible in a small image or short video. The brand has not published current Xiaohongshu conversion figures, so reach should remain separate from sales evidence.
Current Collections Show a More Complex View of Femininity
The Spring/Summer 2025 collection took its theme from The Piano Teacher, exploring “The Pleasure of Rejection” and examining the tension between desire and restraint. The Fall/Winter 2025 collection, titled “Mutual Reference,” drew from Diane Arbus’s photography to explore identity formation and self-awareness.
Spring 2026 drew on Agnès Varda’s film Cléo from 5 to 7 and examined beauty as a response to mortality. Vogue highlighted aged cotton layers, leather cocktail pieces, lace over contrasting underwear, and looser sheaths layered over knitwear. The familiar codes gained cooler materials and less rigid silhouettes.
For Fall 2026, the founders turned to self-invention and the morally complex protagonist of Violette Nozière. Drop waists, argyle knits, plaid pencil skirts, faux fur, and Peter Pan collars carried the story. The founders described femininity as a state that keeps being reinterpreted. That idea protects the label from becoming trapped inside a single coquette fashion moment.
The Collaboration Strategy: From Footwear to Beauty
The ASICS x SHUSHU/TONG Collaboration Made the Brand Legible in Footwear
In August 2025, the ASICS x SHUSHU/TONG release brought the label’s romantic codes to the GEL-KINETIC FLUENT. The two launch colorways, White and Dive Blue, plus Blue Expanse and Monaco Blue, feature ruffled lace trims around the eyestay and heel. The listed price was US$240.
ASICS says the model uses technical welding and eyelet details inspired by running shoes from the 2010s. Its midsole combines FF BLAST PLUS cushioning with Scutoid GEL technology. The SHUSHU/TONG x GEL-KINETIC FLUENT therefore joined technical mass with delicate surface details in a single product.
That product logic explains why searches for ASICS SHUSHU TONG and SHUSHU/TONG shoes have strategic relevance. The collaboration expanded the brand into designer footwear. Its identity remained clearly visible.
ASICS gained a culturally specific fashion viewpoint. A later 2025 iteration and the current Pure Silver and White listing also indicate continuity around the model.
SHUSHU/TONG and Estée Lauder Announced their Second Collaboration
Beyond footwear, SHUSHU/TONG has expanded into beauty. In January 2025, Estée Lauder announced its second collaboration with SHUSHU/TONG, following an initial partnership in 2023.
The 2025情人节限定礼盒, named 「翩然心动」, drew inspiration from SHUSHU/TONG‘s Fall/Winter 2024 floral motifs. The collection included the Estée Lauder lipstick, cushion foundation, and the iconic Advanced Night Repair serum, all with co-branded packaging featuring floral and butterfly elements. Estée Lauder彩妆大使王星越 starred in the campaign.
Charles & Keith Collaboration
The Charles & Keith collaboration brought SHUSHU/TONG into the realm of accessible luxury accessories. The capsule collection featured two Mary Jane shoe styles and two handbags centered around a rose motif.
The rose embodies the SHUSHU/TONG brand DNA, where modern womanhood meets unabashedly feminine details. The collaboration was priced at RMB 1,099 to 1,299 and sold through multiple channels, including the Charles & Keith official mini-program, Tmall flagship store, and Douyin mall.
HAUS NOWHERE and SHUSHU/TONG
In July 2025, HAUS NOWHERE and SHUSHU/TONG launched a collaboration featuring six neck pillows with signature蝴蝶结 details and eleven sleepwear pieces with custom patterns. The collection launched across three cities: Seoul, Shanghai, and Shenzhen.
The HAUS NOWHERE partnership demonstrates SHUSHU/TONG‘s ability to collaborate with retail innovation platforms to create immersive brand experiences.
Each collaboration is a design dialogue where the brand’s visual vocabulary remains front and center. The partnerships extend the brand into new categories, new price points, and new markets while reinforcing its core identity.
From Shanghai Fashion Week to Global Retail Expansion
The brand’s retail structure now combines direct stores, Chinese digital commerce, and selective international wholesale. Its current official directory lists stores in Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou, as well as a Tmall shop. International doors include Dover Street Market locations, Nordstrom, Isetan, Barneys Japan, Club 21, and independent boutiques across several markets.
Vogue reported in October 2025 that the label grew 5 percent to 60 stores in the prior season, operates a Paris showroom for sales, and gained several Korean stockists for Spring 2026. This supports a regional growth pattern rooted in China and East Asia, with placement in global fashion capitals.
Shanghai Fashion Week also functions as a community platform. Vogue described KOLs and clients wearing the brand across the Spring 2026 front row. Such participation turns a runway show into a live demonstration of customer identification with the label.
Celebrity fashion adds discovery. Jennie, Elle Fanning, Dua Lipa, and Ayo Edebiri are among the prominent wearers. Vogue also linked K-pop dressing to stronger demand for Shanghai labels in Korea.
What Global Brands Can Learn From SHUSHU/TONG
Build Memory Before Chasing Reach
A repeatable visual code makes products recognizable across campaigns, stores, celebrities, and collaborations. Vogue’s 2025 Shanghai Fashion Week analysis found that brands with clear narratives and refined collections performed better than labels with less focused offerings.
Translate Identity Through Product Design
The ASICS project worked at the product level. Ruffled trim changed the character of a technical shoe. A strong collaboration strategy starts with a design feature that each partner can credibly own.
Measure Depth After Cultural Attention
The next useful metrics are full-price sell-through, repeat purchase, retailer reorders, store productivity, and sales mix across dresses, separates, and SHUSHU TONG shoes. Celebrity mentions act as discovery signals. These commercial indicators reveal durable demand.
The larger significance of SHUSHU/TONG lies in Chinese cultural confidence. Its Shanghai authorship appears through its point of view, operating base, and community. Global consumers meet a complete fashion world on its own terms. That is a powerful model for brands from China going global.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Who are the founders of SHUSHU/TONG?
The founders are Liushu Lei and Yutong Jiang, both 90s-born designers from Chengdu. They studied at Donghua University in Shanghai and the London College of Fashion, and interned at Simone Rocha and Gareth Pugh.
What does SHUSHU/TONG mean?
SHUSHU/TONG combines the founders’ nicknames, Shushu for Liushu Lei and Tongtong for Yutong Jiang. The name reflects their shared authorship and has served as the label’s official identity since its Shanghai launch in 2015.
Is SHUSHU/TONG a luxury brand?
SHUSHU/TONG sits in the premium designer segment and appears at luxury and directional retailers worldwide. Public sources do not show a formal category declaration, so “independent designer brand” is the most precise description.
Where can I buy SHUSHU/TONG online?
The official stockist directory links to Tmall and major online retailers, including SSENSE, Net-a-Porter, Farfetch, Shopbop, and Nordstrom. Stock changes by season, so confirm size and availability with the listed seller.
How does a SHUSHU/TONG dress fit?
Fit can differ across fitted dresses, knitwear, pleated skirts, and outerwear. Check the measurements on the product page, compare them with those of a garment you own, and ask the retailer about the fabric’s stretch.
How should I care for SHUSHU/TONG dresses?
Follow the sewn-in care label for every item. Pieces with lace, bows, embroidery, or structured panels may need specialist cleaning. Store delicate garments with enough space to protect trims from crushing or snagging.
Are ASICS x SHUSHU/TONG shoes unisex?
ASICS lists the SHUSHU/TONG x GEL-KINETIC FLUENT as a standard-width unisex shoe across men’s and women’s sizing. Buyers should use ASICS’ conversion chart because numerical sizes vary across regional stores.
How much do SHUSHU/TONG x GEL-KINETIC FLUENT shoes cost?
ASICS currently lists a Pure Silver and White SHUSHU/TONG x GEL-KINETIC FLUENT at US$240. Prices, colors, taxes, and availability vary by country, so check with your local ASICS store for current terms.
Does SHUSHU/TONG sell a white dress?
A SHUSHU TONG white dress may appear in one season and disappear in another. Check the official collection archive, Tmall shop, and authorized stockists instead of relying on resale listings or old campaign images.
Has Jennie worn SHUSHU/TONG?
A 2026 interview names Jennie among prominent wearers of SHUSHU/TONG. Celebrity dressing confirms cultural visibility. Sales impact remains private, so retailer reorders and market expansion provide stronger commercial evidence.
