Shanghai street style is exploding – from Wang Lili to Timothy Parent, meet the people who are shaping the scene
People in China are growing bolder and more experimental with what they wear, providing ample fodder for bloggers and scenesters who busily snap the evolving, and sometimes quite shocking, street styles
Dozens of photographers wielding telephoto lenses snapped away outside the tents of Shanghai Fashion Week last month, but their subjects were not pop princesses or movie stars – they were fashion students and eccentrically dressed Chinese industry insiders making their way into one of the event’s 85 scheduled shows and presentations.
Wang Lili is a familiar face at Shanghai Fashion Week, held in the luxury shopping and entertainment hub of Xintiandi district. She is both a “street style” photographer and much photographed local icon who started her working life on a factory assembly line. She then became a novelist before reinventing herself as a street-style photographer five years ago, after attending her first show at Shanghai Fashion Week.
“I live around here, and five years ago my friend had two tickets to one of the shows, so I went and it started my interest in street style,” Wang says.