Inside Kering’s Residency for Chinese Designers
Vogue Business was a fly on the wall during the Italian leg of the French luxury group’s residency for Chinese talent.
Reported by Vogue.
When Luca de Meo stepped into the CEO role at Kering last September, he arrived with a thesis: luxury's future depends on genuine cultural exchange, not just market extraction. That conviction moved fast. By November, de Meo had signed a memorandum of understanding with Shanghai Fashion Week at the China International Import Expo to launch CRAFT — Creative Residency for Artisanship, Fashion and Technology — a structured program bringing ten emerging Chinese designers into the Kering universe across Italy, Paris, and Shanghai, according to Vogue.
The advisory board alone signals how seriously Kering is playing this. Gucci's artistic director Demna sits alongside Chinese couturier Guo Pei, Xiaohongshu founder Miranda Qu, Qeelin creative director Dennis Chan, and writer Camille Charrière, among others — a deliberately bilingual brain trust. The inaugural cohort of ten designers, most in their 30s with degrees from Central Saint Martins or the Royal College of Art, spent a month in Italy with access that reads less like a press tour and more like a masterclass with NDAs attached: visits to Bottega Veneta's atelier, Balenciaga's leather goods factory, Brioni's mountain workshops, Saint Laurent's shoe factory, and exclusive previews of upcoming collection data.
Why China, Why Now
De Meo comes from the automotive world, where he watched European companies fumble the electric vehicle moment while China moved decisively. He's not making the same mistake twice. China once represented 30–40% of Kering's business; post-Covid, that figure sits closer to 20–25% across the luxury sector. Meanwhile, guochao — a rising consumer preference for domestically resonant brands — is reshaping spending habits. "There is a sense of pride in Chinese culture that will lead many local brands to grow and thrive," de Meo told Kering shareholders in May. CRAFT, paired with Kering's investment in Chinese label Icicle, is the group's answer: not a charm offensive, but a structural bet on mutual fluency. Luxury analyst Mario Ortelli of Ortelli & Co calls it "smart," flagging its long-term potential to pipeline design talent directly into Kering's ecosystem or its House of Wonders investment platform.
Inside the program, the details are revealing. Three of the ten designers work in jewelry — a proportion that mirrors Kering's own category ambitions after launching a dedicated jewelry division this year to accelerate Boucheron and deepen jewelry within houses like Gucci. Designer Xu Hao, who co-founded jewelry brand Qiqi around traditional Chinese cultural relics, and Longhong Ziwei, whose Soft Mountains label draws from Yi ethnic minority craft in Yunnan, both described the Italian residency as a reframe on heritage: not as archival weight, but as living, reinterpretable material. "Heritage wasn't treated as something static," Ziwei said. Wang Fengchen, of menswear brand Feng Chen Wang — a Paris Fashion Week Men's regular since 2022 — put it plainly: the next challenge is retail, and she hasn't solved it yet. That's precisely the kind of problem CRAFT is designed to address.
The cohort reconvenes in Paris in September for Kering HQ masterclasses and Fashion Week access, then closes in Shanghai next March with a creative presentation timed to Shanghai Fashion Week — a full-circle structure that's less about optics and more about building something that actually transfers.
CRAFT is Kering making the argument, in the most concrete terms possible, that the brands paying attention to Chinese creative culture now will be the ones that matter there later.
Read the original at Vogue.
