Shanghai Tang, Hong Kong

Shanghai Tang is a Hong kong based high-end fashion label founded by David Tang in 2002 and the nation’s first luxury brand to go global. Shanghai Tang is famed for their quirky take on 1920s -1930s Chinese fashion and reinterpreting the qiapo with colourful fabrics and modern designs.

Shanghai Tang started by making exquisite traditional qipaos using the highest quality fabric and Shanghainese tailoring. The brand offers a wide range of lifestyle items like bed sheets, robes, home decorative and gift items that are popular with the expats and tourist. When the company was bought by the Richemont group, they started to recruit more substantial designers to reposition the brand as a fashion brand. The repositioning included creating advertising campaigns that features some of the most famous Chinese models at the time. To grown the brand, it was important to keep the brand’s DNA, its Chinese identity and at the same time make it contemporary and relevent. Their strategy to add Chinese elements to their fashion line like the Mandarin colour to a work blouse, or the use of the tortise shell prints on a modern cut skirt worked well to establish Shanghai Tang as a serious fashion brand. Lately they have teamed up with up-and-coming contemporary Chinese Fashion Designers to create capsule collections and sold their collections at their Hong Kong stores pushing the Shanghai Tang brand to become a more fashion forward brand further.