Kim Kardashian wears Dior in Shanghai: 10 qipao moments in pop culture

Kim Kardashian arrived in Shanghai on September 26 to launch NikeSkims' first space in mainland China, a five-month pop-up at HKRI Taikoo Hui (兴业太古汇) that opened to the public on September 29. In a bid to connect with Chinese fans, the star has embraced a series of designer qipaos, including an archival Christian Dior look from John Galliano’s Fall 1997 ready-to-wear collection. That dress sums up where the qipao sits in Western popular culture: a British designer’s reading of a Chinese silhouette for a French house, worn by an American star in Shanghai. Galliano has said the collection drew on 1930s Shanghai calendar girls he found in period advertisements for cigarettes and beauty products. The modern qipao emerged in 1920s Shanghai, where it was favored by society women. After 1949 it largely fell out of everyday wear on the mainland. Its story continued in Hong Kong, where many Shanghai tailors resettled, and was then reworked abroad, first by Hollywood and later by a Japanese video game. The fitted, high-slit dress most of the world now recognizes was shaped as much outside the mainland as within it. This list follows, in chronological order, the pop culture moments that fixed or shifted the qipao’s image. It arrives as “xinzhongshi” (新中式), or neo-Chinese style, gains ground beyond China. Chinese designers including Huishan Zhang, Samuel Guì Yang, Shushu/Tong and Uma Wang have reworked traditional dress in their collections. Online, the “Chinamaxxing” trend, driven largely by Gen Z users in the US, has young people adopting Chinese habits and aesthetics. 1. Anna May Wong, 1920s–30s Widely regarded as Hollywood’s first Chinese American star, Wong wore the qipao on screen and in studio portraits while the industry cast her mostly as villains and doomed lovers. Her 1936 visit to China drew a divided response, and some nationalist critics treated her as a traitor for roles they saw as demeaning. The dress was a costume Hollywood assigned her, and it was also a claim to a Chinese identity the studios rarely let her play without caricature. Six decades later, Galliano drew on photographs of her for his spring 1997 couture collection at Dior. 2. Nancy Kwan, The World of Suzie Wong, 1960 Kwan played a Hong Kong sex worker in a run of tight, high-slit cheongsams, as the qipao is known in Cantonese, and the film fixed the “Suzie Wong” look in the Western imagination. It tied the dress to a stereotype of Asian women as exotic and available, one that Asian American writers have long challenged. Much of what follows on this list either borrows from that image or pushes against it. 3. Chun-Li, Street Fighter II, 1991–present Capcom introduced Chun-Li in 1991 in “Street Fighter II: The World Warrior” as the series’ first playable female character. Designer Akira Yasuda put her in a blue, modified qipao with puffed sleeves and spiked wrist cuffs, recasting the dress as fighting gear. The game revived the arcade fighting genre, so a qipao designed in Japan reached a global audience of players, many of whom had never seen a Wong Kar-wai (王家衛) film. Chun-Li remains a cosplay staple, which keeps that version of the dress in circulation with no Chinese label involved. 4. Maggie Cheung, In the Mood for Love, 2000 Cheung (張曼玉) wore more than 20 cheongsams on screen in Wong Kar-wai’s film, set in 1962 Hong Kong, and almost 50 were made for the production by Wong and costume designer William Chang Suk-ping (張叔平). The high collars and rigid cuts mirror characters who never act on what they feel, and the changes of dress help mark the passage of time in a story that rarely states it. The film answered the Suzie Wong image with restraint, and the answer came from Hong Kong. 5. Anne Hathaway, Road to Perdition premiere, 2002 Hathaway wore a floral cheongsam to the New York premiere of “Road to Perdition” in 2002, Yahoo Singapore reported, a year after “The Princess Diaries” made her famous. The same piece credits “In the Mood for Love” with reviving interest in the dress, and Hathaway's look is an early sign of that revival reaching Hollywood's red carpets. 6. Gong Li, Cannes Film Festival, 2004 Gong (巩俐) walked the red carpet at the 57th Cannes Film Festival in 2004 for the premiere of Wong Kar-wai’s “2046” in an imperial-yellow dress carrying motifs from the dragon robes once worn by Chinese emperors, cut to a modified cheongsam silhouette. It was one of at least two qipao-influenced looks she wore at the festival; the South China Morning Post recorded another, a green-blue dress with a cloud print drawn from traditional Chinese art. Here a Chinese star carried the dress’ imperial references onto the Cannes red carpet, the reverse of the Hollywood pattern in the first two entries. 7. Tang Wei, Lust, Caution, 2007 In Ang Lee's Golden Lion winner, set in occupied Shanghai, Tang Wei’s (汤唯) qipaos serve a spy as disguise and, in the film’s tensest scenes, as armor. Chinese regulators effectively barred Tang from mainland media in March 2008. The film put the qipao back on its home ground, worn by a mainland actress, and the fallout showed the limits of what the domestic market would tolerate on screen. 8. Taylor Swift, Grammy Awards, 2012 Swift wore a nude Zuhair Murad gown with gold embellishment, from the designer’s 2011 haute couture collection, to the 2012 Grammy Awards, The National reported, and won two awards that night for “Mean.” The high neck and cap sleeves borrowed the qipao’s collar more than its cut, and the South China Morning Post later grouped the look with qipao-inspired red-carpet dressing. By 2012, the collar alone was enough for the fashion press to read a gown as Chinese-inspired. 9. Zhang Ziyi, Met Gala, 2015 Zhang (章子怡) wore a custom white Carolina Herrera gown to the 2015 Met Gala, whose theme was “China: Through the Looking Glass.” Herrera kept the qipao’s mandarin collar and fitted bodice and paired them with a full skirt and train. In place of the traditional knotted buttons, Zhang wore ruby floral brooches by Taiwanese jeweler Cindy Chao. While many guests reached for dragons and imperial robes that night, the Chinese stars in attendance, Zhang among them, kept their looks restrained. 10. Kim Kardashian, Lucas Museum Opening Gala, 2026 A week before she flew to Shanghai, Kardashian attended the opening-night gala of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles on September 19 in a black Yves Saint Laurent gown from Tom Ford’s fall 2004 collection, his last for the house. The dress has a high collar and a thigh-high slit. W Magazine noted that Ford’s collection referenced the house’s 1977 couture collection inspired by China, and that Céline Dion first wore the same dress to the 2004 World Music Awards.

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10 pop culture moments that shaped the contemporary qipao

How 2026 welcomed ‘Too Cool’ back