Xuzhi Chen is Shanghai’s resident boho spokesman. At first glance, his spring 2026 collection—his second since his big return to the Shanghai Fashion Week fold last season—looked as if it were engineered to accompany the fashion dictionary’s entry on boho-chic, checking every box with its wispy dresses, ballooning pantaloons, and diaphanous silk blouses. But as he explained in the lead up to the show, Chen was getting at something deeper and more romantic.
He cited the French poet Arthur Rimbaud as an inspiration, but rather than focus on his volatile early years and his torrid affair with Paul Verlaine he was thinking about his later days. After spending his youth in the arts, leading a precarious, vagabond-like life with Verlaine, Rimbaud left his career as a writer and began travelling extensively. He traversed Europe, mostly on foot, and became a soldier to explore Indonesia, then the Dutch East Indies, eventually settling in Yemen. On his runway, Chen considered what Rimbaud might have found during his travels.
To his credit, rather than a melange of disparate elements, what Chen conjured was a sense of wanderlust. On the womenswear front, he offered some nice dresses and embellished both blouses and dresses with cascades of ruffles, which he paired with either trousers—jeans or tailored, the former not always successfully—and flouncy skirts. His boho vision was most clearly realized in his menswear: three-piece suits were cut amply but not oversized in pretty silk brocades and styled either shirtless or with blouses and, here and there, a pantaloon—and always accessorized with sandals. Super short-shorts helped add sharpness to the softness of other looks, and amped up the sex appeal of the collection overall. There was an air of idiosyncrasy to his men’s looks that the designer should leverage across his full collection. The story Chen told felt as if Rimbaud had taken up traveling not to move on from his writing, but to document it as a poet.
