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Samuel Gui Yang showed its Spring 2027 collection, Green Snake (青蛇), on 14 October at Shanghai Film CHAO, a 1930s building that draws on both Chinese and Western architecture, during Shanghai Fashion Week. Designers Samuel Yang and Erik Litzén took the title from Tsui Hark’s 1993 film, a retelling of the white snake legend, one of the best-known folk tales in Chinese culture. The collection follows the film’s Green Snake from innocence toward understanding. Four days earlier, the label had opened its first permanent store on Julu Road.
Green Snake is a Hong Kong fantasy drama that Tsui Hark wrote, directed and produced, adapted from Lilian Lee’s novel. Tsui Hark’s other work includes the Once Upon a Time in China series. Lee is also the author of Farewell My Concubine, and a separate 2021 animated film shares the Green Snake title. Maggie Cheung, one of the period’s leading Hong Kong screen actors, plays the Green Snake, and Joey Wong plays the White Snake. Both are serpent spirits who take human form, and in the legend the Green Snake is the White Snake’s companion, close to a sister. The film follows her as she lives among people.
The palette takes its cue from water. Arctic and glacier blues lead, joined by smoky grey-blue, electric green and a note of soft pink. Knitwear is washed and several fabrics are graded in colour, so tone changes across a single garment as the body moves. The prints are painterly, with colour fading from one area of a garment into the next.
The season turns toward the body. Jerseys are fitted and layered, shapes run longer, and openwork follows the figure, a shift for a label that has often favoured generous proportions. Snakeskin patterns are printed on silk and woven into electric-green jacquards, and a golden python print appears too, a first for the label. Draping, pleating and sheer fabrics alternate with softer ones within the collection.
The prints trace back to the painter Ma Yuan’s Water Album. Ma Yuan worked at the Southern Song court in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, and the album is a scroll of 12 parts, each showing a different state of water. The flowing lines of the leaf titled Autumn Water Rippling (秋水回波 in Chinese) became prints on ramie skirts. Ramie is a fibre from a plant in the nettle family, and it has a long history in Chinese textiles. One scholarly catalogue renders that leaf as Autumn Waters, Waves Ever Returning, while the scroll’s Chinese title is 水图 and its English titles vary. Prints from the label’s own archive came back as well, and Yang and Litzén have said that Chinese references are part of how they work.
Blush, the season’s softest print, started from a Victorian porcelain figurine dressed in blue and pink. The finished pattern is described as peach blossom in rain.
Shanghai Film CHAO stands on Xinhua Road in a 1930s building designed by a British architect to blend Eastern and Western styles, and it operates as a hotel inside a Shanghai Film Group complex. Shanghai Film Group also includes Shanghai Film Studio.
The store at 508 Julu Road opened on Saturday, 10 October, the third day of Fashion Week, opposite the Shanghai Writers’ Association. It covers 1,300 square feet, about 120 square metres, with a sunken alcove and a mezzanine on the ground floor of an Art Deco-influenced residential building. Multibrand retailer Labelhood currently operates it. Yang said the plan was to bring the literary culture of Julu Road indoors, and that the time had come to give customers a more direct view of the brand’s story.
The label carries Yang’s name. He is from Shenzhen, and Litzén is from Stockholm. The two met at Central Saint Martins in London. Yang started the label in 2015, Litzén joined as co-creative director in 2017, and they now run it between London and Shanghai. In 2020, they were LVMH Prize semi-finalists, and the brand is grouped with Shushu/Tong, Oude Waag and Mark Gong as the so-called Shanghai Four.
Spring 2026, shown last October at the Rockbund Art Museum, marked ten years of the label, built around tides and the lunar cycle and including reissues such as the 2017 red dress. Fall 2026 was shown at the previous edition of Shanghai Fashion Week.
The week opened on October 8 with HEMU and carries the theme Renewed Radiance, with nearly 100 runway presentations and around 1,000 brands on the schedule. Shanghai Fashion Week is held twice a year, with a spring-summer edition each October and an autumn-winter edition in the spring. Organisers published the Spring 2027 schedule in late September. Samuel Gui Yang’s show sat outside the official runway calendar, with the Green Snake collection reaching the runway at Shanghai Film CHAO on 14 October, the seventh day of the week.
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