For their 10th anniversary, Pronounce’s designers Yushan Li and Jun Zhou presented a special collection during Shanghai Fashion Week, drawing on the interplay of yin and yang to rethink the conventions of masculinity and femininity through a female lens. Not quite a female gaze, Li and Zhou insisted, but an exercise in shifting perspective: seeing gender through a woman’s eyes. They called the collection Through Her Eyes.
The idea translated into linear silhouettes, soft tailoring, and unstructured pieces designed for light layering. While pared down almost to abstraction, the clothes remained free of conceptual fuss, and grounded in the everyday. Masculine and feminine elements blurred into one another without requiring a grand statement about gender fluidity. Eastern dress codes informed the proportions and construction, but references were loosened and reconfigured, as if tradition could use a little breathing room.
The designers also introduced a generational dimension, bringing together young models and more mature women, reflecting their interest in characters shaped by experience. The finale had an unexpected guest star: Dr. Qin Huilan, a retired Shanghai physician whose love of Prada and Miu Miu has taken her from the doctor’s office to the Miu Miu runway in Paris for fall 2024. This time, she joined the last model for an impromptu walk. The idea had come together only that morning, the designers explained, and Dr. Qin was happy to oblige. It was an unrehearsed gesture that echoed the collection’s ease and its refusal to overstate a point.
Ten years on, Pronounce has moved away from some of the subcultural references that informed its early work toward a more considered focus on personality, material, and the way clothes feel on the body. Its audience has grown up alongside the brand, the designers observed, becoming more attentive and subtle in its appreciation. For Yushan Li and Jun Zhou, growing older seems to be less about leaving the past behind than about finding more nuanced ways to build on it.