The Shenzhen fashion house HUI showed its Spring/Summer 2027 collection, The Fan Code, on the evening of September 27 local time in Italy, at Via Meravigli 7 in central Milan. The venue is Palazzo Turati, an 1880 neo-Renaissance building that now houses the Milan campus of Istituto Marangoni. The campus conversion kept the frescoed rooms, the granite colonnade courtyard and the panoramic terrace intact, so the historic palace works as a site for fashion, design and luxury education rather than a container for old objects.
What the Fan Leaves Behind
In the collection the fan appears as a trace left between tradition and the present, and the show does not try to restore one or to explain what it once meant. The line points toward a China that HUI reads through the handicraft of the Miao (苗族) people of southwest China, and through the way Miao women carry memory in weaving, embroidery, dyeing and sewing. Generation after generation they use needle and thread as a brush, setting family memory and the marks of time into dress motifs. In the brand’s own aesthetics, tradition stays rooted in people and in daily life.
Twelve Minutes of Layering
Close to twelve minutes, the runway moved through the clues that tradition leaves and placed motif, colour, handmade texture and the cultural memory of Eastern women back into contemporary clothing. Printed silk, sheer materials and more structured fabrics overlap; old patterns are pulled apart and reorganised so that they find a new place in fresh silhouettes, proportions and material relationships. The design team drew out traditional motifs, classical colour pairings and handmade grain, then reworked proportion and cutting to build a form it describes as softness with structure, transparency with coverage, and flow balanced against restraint. Tradition here is a wearable, perceptible, iterable language rather than a retro symbol kept for viewing.
Red Thread Across the Set
Red thread carries the same idea into the room. The Italian multidisciplinary artist Maria Jole Serreli, who has worked with HUI since 2018 and builds in fibre, installation and performance, designed the central sofa bench and the red-thread installation that links to it. Her red line becomes a visual clue in the space, pulling the collection’s talk of culture, women and time out of the clothes and into the set. FashionNetwork reported that the show opened with a performance in the courtyard: a Western woman moved through a woven web of red threads, unwound them layer by layer and finally unfolded a fan, after which the runway began. Each gesture was staged as a metaphor for the link between East and West.
The Woman the Brand Sees
Yizhihui Fashion Group founder and chief designer Zhao Huizhou (赵卉洲) and Serreli took the closing bow together, and the collection restates the brand’s image of the contemporary Eastern woman. She is a participant, a maker and a reformer rather than a fixed cultural symbol or a bystander, holding gentleness and toughness, inheritance and breakthrough at once, able to take nutrients from tradition and to step past its limits. FashionNetwork’s on-site report noted printed silk, semi-transparent materials and more structured fabrics taking turns on the runway, with the dialogue between softness and structure, transparency and coverage, and flow and restraint standing out, and said critics and industry guests recognised the designer’s steady growth from one season to the next.
Rather than give a complete answer about the East, The Fan Code leaves a few traces: a colour, a motif, a pair of hands, a garment, and a woman who is becoming herself. Seen from the seats, the show starts from a single fan, and what HUI reveals is a wider field of culture and people beyond it.
