Xuezhi Chen is a Shanghai-based boho spokesperson. At first glance, her Spring 2026 collection – her second since her big comeback at Shanghai Fashion Week last season – looked like it was engineered with a fashion dictionary entry on boho-chic, checking every box with its slinky dresses, ballooning pantaloons and diaphanous silk blouses. But as he revealed at the beginning of the show, Chen was going for something darker and more romantic.
He cited the French poet Arthur Rimbaud as an inspiration, but instead of focusing on the ups and downs of his early years and his tragic relationship with Paul Verlaine, he was thinking about his later days. After spending his youth in art, living a precarious, vagabond-like life with Verlaine, Rimbaud abandoned his career as a writer and began traveling extensively. He traveled to Europe, mostly on foot, and became a soldier, exploring Indonesia, then the Dutch East Indies, and eventually settled in Yemen. On his runway, Chen contemplates what Rimbaud might have encountered during his travels.
To his credit, rather than a mixture of disparate elements, what Chen produced was a sense of wandering. On the women’s wear front, he introduced some nice dresses and decorated both blouses and dresses with cascades of ruffles, which he paired with either trousers—jeans or tailored ones, the former not always successful—and flouncey skirts. His boho vision was most clearly realized in his menswear: three-piece suits were richly cut but not oversized in beautiful silk brocade and were styled either shirtless or with a blouse and, occasionally, a pantaloon – and were always worn with sandals. The super short-shorts helped add edginess to the softness of other looks, and increased the sex appeal of the collection overall. There was a singularity to his men’s looks that designers should take advantage of throughout their collections. From the story Chen told, it seemed as if Rimbaud had embarked on the journey not to pursue his writing, but to document it as a poet.
