Beyond Made in China: Brands that sell stories at Paris Fashion Week

During Paris Fashion Week’s Spring/Summer 2027 season, which ran from September 28 to October 6, Chinese brands arrived with places, memories, crafts, rituals and ways of living alongside their products. Three brands each represented a different facet of contemporary Chinese creativity. Songmont (山下有松) makes leather bags and accessories that draw on traditional Chinese culture. Keigan (开间) is a womenswear label that blends contemporary design with art and lifestyle. The third, The Beast Home (THB) (野兽派家居), is the home textiles and loungewear brand of Beast (野兽派), a Shanghai company that began as a florist and grew into a lifestyle group. Together, they point to a shift in Chinese brands’ global ambitions. For decades, the label “Made in China” defined what the country sent abroad. These brands are now exporting stories from China as well. Songmont: Turning a handbag into a cultural object Songmont offered perhaps the most immersive experience of the three. In its third consecutive year of exhibiting in Paris during fashion week, the brand staged Song of Mont (远山有声), where visitors met a pagoda hung from the ceiling before they saw a single handbag. The huge structure, known in Chinese as a “ta” (塔), dominated the space. Pagodas are a cultural symbol deeply rooted in Shanxi, Songmont’s home province. The installation tied regional heritage directly to the design process. Historic architecture shapes the structure of the bags — the Drippy Roof bag takes its proportions from classical Asian buildings — while traditional textiles and motifs are reworked into contemporary patterns. Tibetan craft featured too. Songmont’s Yore bags carry a tiger-tooth motif that the brand describes as sacred in Tibetan culture. The exhibition also showed how “pulu” (氆氇), a hand-woven Tibetan wool cloth, is made. Songmont produces it with a Tibetan workshop in Garzê, in Sichuan province as part of the brand’s Crafting Goodwill heritage program. Elsewhere, Songmont deconstructed and reimagined the embroidery of Shanxi’s tiger-head hats, or “hutou mao” (虎头帽). Families in the province traditionally give the hats to babies at one month old as a blessing, a custom that continues today. Through objects, videos, craft demonstrations and interactive displays, the exhibition explained the stories and symbolism behind each piece. It showed how cultural references can shape a product from its conception. In Songmont’s telling, the handbag comes at the end of the story. Plenty of brands describe a bag as “inspired by Chinese culture.” Songmont traced each reference back to its source and meaning, then showed how its designers had transformed it. Keigan: Shanghai identity meets a global creative apartment Keigan took a different route. The digitally native womenswear label built its business online and opened its first physical store, in Shanghai, in October 2025. In Paris, it partnered with Marie Claire China to connect fashion with the wider worlds of art and design. Rooted in Shanghai, Keigan takes its name from “kaijian” (开间), an architectural term for the width of a room. The brand spells the word as it is pronounced in Shanghainese, a nod to its home city. That interest in space carries over into the clothes, which Keigan treats as an expression of personal identity and contemporary urban life. Its Paris space took the form of an apartment, with each room created alongside international artists and designers through the brand’s Genius Initiative. Harry Nuriev, the New York- and Paris-based designer who founded Crosby Studios, conceived a Denim Mahjong Room that brought interior design to mahjong, one of China’s most recognizable social rituals. Paris floral studio opm, culinary artist Lena Ghaninejad and French straw-marquetry specialist Lison de Caunes each brought their own discipline to other parts of the apartment. Shanghai, specifically, anchored the project. Keigan used the apartment to start a cultural conversation between its home city and Paris, with a strong Shanghainese identity at its foundation. TBH: Exporting the emotional idea of a Shanghai home For TBH, cultural export came through something more intimate: the feeling of being at home. Founded in Shanghai in 2018, TBH makes textiles, bedding, loungewear and objects for contemporary domestic life. Its first Paris exhibition, “House of Dreams,” took over a 17th-century house in the Marais, and used it to tell a wider story about how home and memory shape cultural identity. “We imagine home through life fragments we know by heart,” the brand said. Those fragments come from everyday Shanghai: clothes hanging outside windows, breezes drifting between balconies, the bustle of the “longtang” (弄堂, the city’s traditional alleyway neighborhoods) and the moment at the end of the day when the body finally unwinds. Where Songmont reached for heritage symbols, TBH stuck to the ordinary textures of Shanghai life: laundry, bedrooms, fabrics and the memories attached to them. This sensibility shaped the exhibition itself. A moon gate, the circular doorway found in classical Chinese gardens, welcomed visitors, and the textiles and domestic objects beyond it evoked Shanghai’s atmosphere. Collaborations and limited editions with French artists carried the story into Paris and put the two cities in conversation. That restraint is what makes the approach compelling. The brand leaves its cultural identity unspoken, and it shows in how each object is imagined and how it is meant to be lived with. From Chinese aesthetics to Chinese narratives A previous generation of international branding often reduced Chinese cultural identity to recognizable visual codes: motifs, colors, symbols or collaborations timed for Chinese New Year. What we saw in Paris this season was considerably more sophisticated. In each case, the brands used culture to build a world around the product. Physical retail and pop-ups are particularly well suited to this. For a few minutes, consumers inhabit the brand’s interpretation of China. Paris as a cultural amplifier Paris Fashion Week remains the high point of the fashion calendar. This season’s official schedule alone held 68 runway shows and 34 presentations, and its audience reaches far beyond the city. Chinese brands of this new generation arrive with a cultural identity already built at home. Paris works as an amplifier for it, and Western approval is a secondary concern. Earlier Chinese labels often played down their origins to look international. These brands put a contemporary Chinese identity at the center of how they speak to the world. Overseas stores and international revenue will remain the obvious measures of Chinese brands going global. The next phase may also be judged by whether they can make audiences abroad curious about the cultural worlds behind their products. The Chinese Pulse is a prospective and strategic consulting agency dedicated to accompanying brands on the Asian contemporary markets (China, South Korea, Japan) in the beauty, lifestyle, fashion, luxury and hospitality industries.

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Beyond Made in China: Brands that sell stories at Paris Fashion Week