| By Elena Sendona on September 28, 2026 |
There are objects whose beauty lies as much in what they conceal as in what they reveal. For HUI Milano, the circular fan became precisely that kind of object: an invitation to unfold a story, one gesture at a time. On Sunday, September 27 in Milan, HUI Milano presented its Spring/Summer 2027 collection, “The Fan Code,” during Milan Fashion Week. Under the creative direction of founder Huizhou Zhao, the presentation explored Chinese cultural memory, women’s role in carrying traditions forward, and the possibilities that emerge when heritage is treated as a living creative language.
The setting established the mood before the first look appeared. In an old Italian courtyard, a Western female performer encountered a web of red threads stretched across the space. The installation suggested connections across time, geography and memory, while the fan became the instrument through which the performer navigated the threads. As the final strand was released and the fan opened, the soundscape shifted and the first model entered.
A Fan Becomes a Code
The circular fan provided “The Fan Code” with its initial visual vocabulary, yet Zhao resisted treating it as a decorative motif to be repeated across a wardrobe. Instead, its significance expanded into a meditation on the ways culture survives through gestures, skills, materials and the people who continue to practice them.
That perspective feels closely connected to Zhao’s wider creative practice. HUI Milano describes itself as a luxury fashion house built around the meeting of Chinese heritage and contemporary design, with silk artistry, embroidery, dyeing and historical dress among the elements informing its design language. Zhao, who graduated from Politecnico di Milano, has developed the house around an ongoing exchange between Chinese cultural traditions and an international fashion context.
For Spring/Summer 2027, that exchange found expression through printed silk, translucent surfaces and more structured textiles. Fluidity met precision; moments of transparency gave way to greater coverage; soft movement was interrupted by defined construction. Historical imagery, motifs, colors, textures and evidence of handwork appeared as fragments to be rearranged rather than preserved as untouchable quotations from the past. The result proposed heritage as material for continued creativity.
The Women Who Carry Memory
At the emotional center of “The Fan Code” were women and the ways knowledge travels through their hands. The collection turned its attention to Miao women in Guizhou, where textile practices including embroidery, weaving, dyeing and sewing have long served as vehicles for cultural knowledge and identity. Miao embroidery itself has been recognized in China as an important form of intangible cultural heritage, with its patterns and techniques carrying histories, aesthetics and inherited knowledge across generations.
This is familiar territory within HUI’s broader cultural work. The HUI Foundation, established in 2016, states that it works to preserve traditional Chinese crafts and has focused on the handicrafts of ethnic communities including the Miao, Buyi and Dong. The foundation also supports encounters with communities in Guizhou and initiatives intended to help traditional skills remain viable.
HUI has previously brought Miao craftsmanship into its Milan presentations. Zhao has explored Miao embroidery and cultural traditions from Guizhou in earlier collections, making the Spring/Summer 2027 narrative part of a longer investigation rather than an isolated seasonal reference.
In “The Fan Code,” however, the emphasis settles particularly on the woman as an active author of culture. She receives knowledge, but she can also alter it. She may preserve a technique, reinterpret an inherited form, introduce a new idea or decide which elements will accompany her into the future. That sense of agency gives the collection much of its emotional charge. Tradition becomes something performed and transformed in real time.
Huizhou Zhao’s Fashion of Cultural Continuity
Zhao’s work has repeatedly returned to the question of how Chinese heritage can enter contemporary fashion without becoming frozen in nostalgia. Her answer here arrives through suggestion and layering.
A motif can hold a memory without recreating a historical garment. A textile can retain evidence of handcraft while inhabiting a thoroughly modern silhouette. Transparency can expose one layer while obscuring another. Even the movement of fabric across the body becomes part of the narrative.
This approach also gives “The Fan Code” its sense of intimacy. The collection asks the viewer to notice details rather than search for a single grand symbol. Meaning accumulates through a sequence of visual clues: the glimmer of silk, the weight of a structured textile, the trace of an image, the movement of a silhouette, the memory contained within a craft.
The red threads of the opening performance suddenly feel especially apt. Cultural identity rarely travels along a perfectly straight line. It passes between generations and places, gathering new experiences while retaining connections to what came before.
Milan Meets a Culture in Motion
Presenting the collection in Milan gave that idea a physical setting. An Italian courtyard became the stage for a story rooted in Chinese culture, while a Western performer opened the presentation by moving through red threads with a Chinese fan. The staging created an encounter between cultural perspectives without erasing their distinct identities.
For HUI Milano, this dialogue has long formed part of the house’s identity. Its official philosophy places Chinese craftsmanship and cultural heritage in conversation with contemporary design, while the HUI Foundation and the HUI Century Fashion Museum extend that interest into heritage preservation and historical research. The museum in Shenzhen holds garments and textiles spanning the Qing Dynasty through the modern era, including pieces associated with China’s ethnic minority traditions.
Seen within that wider context, “The Fan Code” reads as another chapter in Zhao’s continuing exploration of what cultural continuity can look like when fashion is allowed to participate in it.
Spring/Summer 2027 also avoids presenting the East as a single, easily decoded image. Its references arrive gradually. The circular fan may offer an entrance, but it does not provide a complete explanation. The collection instead encourages attention to the individuals, techniques and gestures through which culture continues to exist.
That distinction matters. A fan can be placed behind glass and admired. Embroidery can be archived. A historic garment can be carefully conserved. Living culture requires something more: people who continue to make, wear, adapt, remember and imagine.
On HUI Milano’s Spring/Summer 2027 runway, that idea took shape in silk, translucency, structure and movement. It appeared in the symbolic red threads crossing an Italian courtyard and in the women whose craftsmanship inspired the collection’s deeper narrative.
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