HOME

HUI – BACKSTAGE – SS 27

HUI – RUNWAY – SS 27

HUI – RUNWAY – SS 27

HUI – DETAIL – SS 27

HUI – AMBIENCE – SS 27

HUI – PERFORMANCE – SS 27

Milan, September 2026 – On the occasion of Milan Fashion Week, HUI Milano presented THE FAN CODE, the Spring/Summer 2027 collection that began with an element of Eastern culture – the circular fan – to develop a broader reflection on Chinese culture, the relationship between memory and contemporaneity, and the role of women in the transmission and transformation of tradition.

For HUI, the fan is a first clue, a sign through which to approach a culture that could not be reduced to its most recognisable symbols. THE FAN CODE did not reconstruct its forms or meanings, but used this trace to look beyond the object and question what Chinese culture continued to express through people, gestures and everyday practices.

The collection was introduced by a performance held in the heart of an ancient Italian courtyard: a Western woman entered into a dialogue with a web of red threads stretching across the space, evoking memory, time, and the connections between East and West. The fan became the key to this journey: through movement, the performer followed and crossed the threads, transforming each gesture into a gradual process of discovery. When the final thread was opened and the fan unfolded, the music changed and the first model appeared, marking the beginning of the fashion show.

HUI Spring Summer 27 Collection

Culture Lives Through People

One of the central themes of the collection was the relationship between women, memory and cultural transmission. HUI Milano looked in particular to the Miao women of Guizhou, who through weaving, embroidery, dyeing and sewing had passed down collective memories, identities and knowledge over time. It was precisely through the act of creation that, for HUI, tradition continued to live: not as an immobile heritage to be preserved in its original form, but as a material capable of evolving. The Eastern woman portrayed by HUI was therefore not a symbolic figure bound to the past, but an active protagonist in this process, free to inherit, modify, preserve or choose anew.

This vision reflected the creative journey of Huizhou Zhao, founder and designer of the brand and ambassador of China Style in Italy, whose work had for years centred on the dialogue between Chinese culture and the international fashion system.

In THE FAN CODE, references to Chinese culture were translated into a contemporary fashion vocabulary. Motifs, colours, historical imagery, textures and traces of craftsmanship were fragmented, recomposed and incorporated into new proportions and silhouettes. The collection brought together printed silk, translucent materials and more structured fabrics, alternating softness and construction, transparency and coverage, movement and rigour. Heritage was not faithfully reproduced, but interpreted through a system of forms and materials capable of bringing it into the present.

This was HUI Milano’s perspective on the contemporary East: a culture that was not defined once and for all, but remained in motion, capable of preserving its roots while continuing to generate new meanings. The fan was only the first clue. The true code of THE FAN CODE unfolded along the continuum of Chinese culture and through the people who still lived it, reinterpreted it and contributed to its transformation.

The collection deliberately left the interpretation open, entrusting it to a succession of traces – a colour, a motif, a gesture, a fabric, a silhouette – that progressively constructed an image of the contemporary East.

For HUI Milano, tradition was not something to be observed from a distance, but a living language that could still be created, worn and interpreted. THE FAN CODE thus emerged from a question rather than an answer: what remained of a culture when it ceased to be an image of the past and became once again a material of the present?

The East does not reveal itself all at once. It unfolds.