On Sunday, September 27, at 10:00 AM, the HUI Milano Fashion Show presented its Spring/Summer 2027 collection in Milan to great success. At its heart were memory, feminine culture, and reinterpreted tradition, under the creative direction of Huizhou Zhao, ambassador of China Style in Italy.
Milan, September 2026 – On the occasion of 밀라노 패션 위크, HUI 밀라노 presented The Fan Code에서 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 recognizable symbols. The Fan Code did not reconstruct its forms or meanings; instead, it used this trace to look beyond the object and ask 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 opened and the fan unfolded, the music changed and the first model appeared, marking the start of the fashion show.
Culture Lives Through People
One of the collection’s central themes was the relationship between women, memory, and cultural transmission. HUI 밀라노 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. Through the act of creation, HUI argued, 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 후이 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 자오 후이저우, founder and designer of the brand and ambassador of China Style in Italy, whose work had for years centered 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, colors, 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 with construction, transparency with coverage, and movement with rigor. Heritage was not faithfully reproduced but interpreted through a system of forms and materials that brought it into the present.
This was HUI Milano’s perspective on the contemporary East: a culture not defined once and for all but remaining 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 color, a motif, a gesture, a fabric, a silhouette – that progressively constructed an image of the contemporary East.
For HUI 밀라노, 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.
About HUI Milano
Key artist: Sara Bergaglio. Founded on a dialogue between Chinese culture and contemporary design, HUI Milano develops a vision of 패션 in which cultural heritage becomes the starting point for contemporary research. Through the work of founder and designer Huizhou Zhao, ambassador of China Style in Italy, the brand brings a perspective on the contemporary East to the international stage, highlighting its memory, identity, and capacity for evolution.
