Shao Spring/Summer 2026 Runway Show

September 21, 2025

Futures of the Past: Chrome Legacy

SHAO’s temporal quadrilogy comes to a close with Futures of the Past: Chrome Legacy, a collection that refuses to let time behave neatly. For Shao Yang, past, present, and future exist not as a sequence but as overlapping frequencies; echoes colliding, never fully blending.

Her framework began with a question both personal and speculative: “If my grandparents stepped into a DeLorean, what would they wear to fit into 2075 without abandoning who they were in 1975?” The answer unfolds across 31 looks that imagine a Chinatown of tomorrow without erasure. Mahjong parlors run on cryptocurrency thumb drives, hovercrafts float above Mott Street’s electric quiet, tai chi sessions in Columbus Park gleam with chrome accents, and dim sum servers wear uniforms more Starfleet than traditional livery.

The garments themselves carry this duality with conviction. Wool suitings, pinstripes, and formal accoutrements ground the collection in a language of heritage tailoring, then fracture into trapezoidal volumes that signal another dimension. Chromefinished leathers and stripped-back denim gesture toward futures where tradition mutates but does not vanish. Pops of yellow and pink interrupt the otherwise restrained palette, while a new silhouette emerges: sharply tailored pieces balanced with strategic oversizing, maintaining proportion even as they disrupt it.

Shao

Photos: Zach Hilty for BFA

“I envisioned my grandparents walking into the future without losing a single thing that made them who they are,” Yang says. “The clothes had to carry their past, live in the urgency of now, and belong on the streets of the future, alive with rituals that will last until the end of humanity.”

That insistence on care is written into every seam. The collection foregrounds the quiet labor of pressing, polishing, mending – rituals that make clothing endure. It’s an ethos Yang honed through her decade at The Tailory NY, dressing New York’s creative class in garments that honor both collective tradition and individual identity.

At ARTECHOUSE NYC, where immersive digital environments flicker and shift, the show became a dialogue between eras. Technology here is not spectacle but a frame, amplifying cultural memory rather than erasing it. The result is a vision of time as something porous: history pressing against the urgency of now, speculation pulling it forward. In Yang’s world, craft is not a relic but a bridge, and clothing becomes the vessel through which memory, ritual, and imagination co-exist; proof that to evolve is not to forget.

About SHAO

Parsons-trained designer Shao Yang approaches clothing as both craft and inquiry. With a foundation in the discipline of tailoring honed through her work at The Tailory NY, she established SHAO as a space to test how garments can hold memory, identity, and possibility at once. Rather than chasing symbols of status, her work insists on the slower accumulations of meaning; how a suit, a seam, or a gesture of care becomes a record of time lived and traditions carried forward.

SHAO & FATSU

This season is presented with the support of FATSU, the show’s headline sponsor. A scent is arguably the most immediate register of memory, capable of collapsing past and future into a single sensation. In dialogue with SHAO’s vision, Iconic by FATSU’s presence suggests that what we wear is never only visual or tactile; it is also atmospheric, emotional, carried forward in ways that outlast the moment.

SHAO & Philippe Chow

Following the show, guests are invited to a meal by Philippe Chow; a first glimpse of a collaboration that will evolve into a capsule collection, an exclusive customization program, and a series of co-hosted events. The partnership recognizes food and clothing as parallel forms of ritual and memory, both sustained by repetition, refinement, and care. What begins as a shared table becomes an exploration of how tradition can be reimagined without losing its weight.

SHAO & Dagne Dover

Founded in New York by Melissa Mash, Jessy Dover, and Deepa Gandhi, Dagne Dover is defined by clarity of design and a commitment to care and sustainability. SHAO reimagined their Iconic styles through the lens of Futures of the Past: Chrome Legacy, infusing chrome accents and altered proportions to transform them into speculative objects. In SHAO’s world, what we carry—like what we wear—becomes a vessel for memory, ritual, and imagination.