AWAYLEE Unveils SS27 at Shanghai Fashion Week: ‘Dream of the Red Chamber’

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – Los Angeles, CA – October 2026

AWAYLEE Unveils SS27 at Shanghai Fashion Week: ‘Dream of the Red Chamber’

AWAYLEE presents Dream of the Red Chamber, its Spring/Summer 2027 collection, at Shanghai Fashion Week (SHFW) on October 12, 2026.

Drawing from one of China’s most enduring literary works, the collection considers what it means to live inside circumstances we did not choose, and what remains possible within them. As in the novel, love, beauty and prosperity exist under the shadow of impermanence, shaped by the tension between individual desire and forces beyond our control.

This tension between what is given and what can be changed speaks to movement, change and the cycles through which a life unfolds. Rather than positioning fate and free will as binary, SS27 considers the space between them: what is written and what remains unwritten. Flowers bloom and fall; abundance gives way to absence; beauty is precious precisely because it does not last.

Heritage-inspired, fluid forms meet precise modern tailoring, while layered constructions and elongated silhouettes create a sense of movement and transformation. Silk, organza and chiffon shift between structure and dissolution, permanence and impermanence. AWAYLEE finds a precedent for this duality in jade itself, prized in Chinese thought for holding warmth and resilience in the same material. It is a gentleness that does not compromise its strength.

Among the collection’s most labor-intensive pieces is a hand-carved ceramic bodice, developed in direct collaboration with a ceramic artist working outside fashion. It is one of several partnerships this season with artists in other mediums. The piece extends a principle central to AWAYLEE’s own philosophical tradition around stone and jade: that craftsmanship is not the imposition of a design onto raw material, but the revealing of a form already latent within it. Traditional jade carving holds to working with the material’s own nature rather than against it, removing only what obscures the stone’s inherent beauty. Fired, carved and finished entirely by hand, the ceramic bodice carries that same philosophy onto the body. The garment does not decorate the wearer so much as reveal her, the way a carver reveals what the stone already contains.

That same conversation between old and new technique continues in the collection’s jade, mutton fat jade and blood amber pieces. Each is first sculpted digitally in three dimensions, then realized through 3D printing and finished entirely by hand with painted detail, a contemporary translation of a material tradition that would otherwise be limited by what stone alone can do. The approach runs across the collection’s jewelry and into a hand sculpted blood amber bodice, one of the season’s most intricate special pieces, its dimensional floral appliqué built up layer by layer to resemble carved stone. Together with the ceramic bodice, these pieces span centuries of technique within a single collection: hand carving and digital sculpture in service of the same idea, that material holds meaning, and that meaning survives however it is made.

The collection’s palette follows a similar progression, from soft porcelain neutrals, powdery pastels and delicate botanical tones to richer reds, mineral blues, earthy browns, charcoal and black. This gradual descent from lightness into shadow gives color a narrative role, mirroring the collection’s movement from abundance and possibility toward impermanence and inevitability. Color appears, intensifies and recedes, echoing the cyclical nature of 运 (yùn).

Craft remains central to AWAYLEE’s expression more broadly. Traditional techniques, including embroidery, dimensional florals and hand-worked surface treatments, are interpreted through contemporary construction and material experimentation, continuing the house’s approach to Chinese heritage as a living design language rather than a static reference. Each technique becomes a means of negotiating past and present: what is inherited, what is preserved, and what can be transformed.

The SHFW event is conceived as a dark, mist-filled dreamscape, suspended between reality and illusion. Silhouettes emerge through shadow and diffuse light before disappearing again, reflecting the collection’s exploration of fate, impermanence and the fleeting nature of beauty. Attendees will feel transported into the illusory world of Dream of the Red Chamber: intimate, in flux, and tinged with the sense of beauty slipping just beyond one’s grasp.

Runway Images

About AWAYLEE

AWAYLEE is a fashion house rooted in Chinese nature, art, philosophy and culture, working in close collaboration with master crafts people and local artists across mediums. Each garment is a canvas for these ideas, not used as aesthetic cues but as guiding principles that shape silhouette, material and construction. Every collection observes an interplay between concept, time and philosophy, translating observation into palette, texture and form, deepening the house’s ongoing exploration of Chinese heritage.