Wendy Yu Launches a New Prize for Emerging Designers in China

If Shanghai Fashion Week wasn’t on your radar before, it’s impossible to miss what’s happening in the city right now. Following a round of mostly-digital shows in New York and Europe, Shanghai’s spring 2021 schedule is packed with more than 90 events—IRL ones—and lots of news. One headline comes from Wendy Yu, the investor, philanthropist, and namesake of the Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a title she endowed to Andrew Bolton in 2018. In a similar show of funding and nurturing creativity, she’s announcing the launch of the Yu Prize, a new program to scout, promote, and support rising talents in China.

The initiative aims to support designers locally and boost their international visibility, but Yu also hopes it can lend some structure to the country’s rapidly-growing fashion industry. “It’s a very exciting time for Chinese fashion,” she tells Vogue. “We are seeing many talents emerge with greater sophistication and confidence in their design and manufacturing capabilities. However, there is still little support and structure in the industry, [both] for those who have the potential to breakthrough internationally and succeed domestically. We do not have an official body dedicated to the development of young designers, such as as the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode or the Council of Fashion Designers of America,” she explains. “I felt passionate about creating our own platform that would align with Yu Holdings’s mission to ‘cultivate creativity’ and incubate and accelerate our rising stars. As consumers in China are increasingly interested in shopping local brands, this makes the opportunity all the more promising.”