Hui: the fan as a bridge between the West and a changing East

During Milan Fashion Week, Hui Milano presented ‘The Fan Code,’ a Spring–Summer 2027 collection that took as its starting point an emblem of East Asian culture — the circular fan — to open up a broader reflection on China, the relationship between memory and the contemporary, and the role of women in transmitting and transforming tradition.

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The collection was introduced by a performance in the heart of the historic courtyard of a Milan palazzo: a Western woman with a shaved head who — whilst guests gradually entered the colonnaded courtyard that hosted the show — remained seated, motionless and silent, eyes closed. She then rose, opened a circular fan and began a kind of dance through which she engaged with a web of red threads spanning the space, tracing and weaving her way among them, evoking the concepts underpinning the show: memory, time and the connections between East and West. For Hui, the fan becomes a first key to approaching a culture, embodying its gradual discovery.

In the show, Hui Milano looked — as in recent seasons — to the techniques of the Miao women of Guizhou who, through weaving, embroidery, dyeing, and sewing, have handed down collective memories, identity, and knowledge over generations. Hui’s East Asian woman is not a symbolic figure bound to the past, but an active protagonist, free to inherit, adapt, preserve or choose anew.

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Patterns, colours, historical imagery, textures, and traces of handwork were fragmented, recomposed and set into new proportions, silhouettes and volumes — winning the appreciation of the critics and industry professionals in attendance, who recognised the Chinese designer’s steady stylistic growth from one collection to the next.

Printed silk, translucent materials and more structured fabrics take centre stage, alternating softness with construction, transparency with opacity, movement with rigour. The heritage is not reproduced faithfully, but interpreted through a language of shapes, cuts and materials that brings it into the present.

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Particularly striking were the dialogues between constructed fabrics and lighter, more tactile surfaces; the contrast between movement and rigidity; and the alternation of notably soft garments with rigorously constructed pieces — mirroring the path Huizhou Zhao has been tracing for years in her fashion: Chinese memory and tradition set alongside Western forms and research, distilled into highly contemporary, wearable designs.