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A Feel For Fashion: Audrey Hu

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Based in Shanghai, Audrey Hu has been instrumental in redefining modern Chinese fashion storytelling through editorial content that blends bold creativity with cultural nuance. She is now the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of Dazed China, which launched just last month under a partnership between Dazed Media and Meta Media Group. The quarterly magazine will feature emerging talents across fashion, art, film, music and digital culture to reflect Gen Z’s rising influence in China. Previously, Hu held key editorial positions such as Fashion Director at Vogue China and Fashion Director at Large at W Magazine China. She also runs her own creative agency, Creature. Her ability to identify and champion emerging creative voices has been a consistent hallmark of her career, as she produces work that is at once visually striking and culturally relevant. Hu is in Paris for Haute Couture, making the rounds while representing her new and exciting role.

In a fast-paced society filled where we feel the pull of algorithmic hierarchies, what do you make of the slow processes involved in crafting haute couture? 

For me, the slow process is precisely what saves couture from becoming content. It’s not meant to be consumed in a 15-second video. It’s meant to be experienced – up close, with your eyes and fingertips, in real life. And that experience is radically personal. It refuses to be categorised. It refuses to be ranked. Haute Couture feels like the last honest rebellion. It doesn’t care about your browsing history or how many likes it generates. It doesn't optimize for engagement. It takes months to make one dress – hours spent on a single pleat, a thousand beads sewn by hand, a fit that’s adjusted to your body, not some averaged size chart. And it takes just that one special person to fall in love this one special piece. In an age of speed, slowness is luxury. In an age of algorithms, imperfection is identity.

 

What is the most significant change you are seeing in fashion right now?

We’re closing in with authenticity and realness. Not as a trend. As a refusal.

 

Where do you look for new ideas or voices in fashion?

The non-fashion places.

 

What are you most curious to know about how designers work, how a collection comes together?

I would love to see how they research and think. And here’s what fascinates me: the gap between everything they consume and that one thing they eventually make.

 

What is one fashion show you wish you had attended, no matter the era?

Alexander McQueen’s Spring-Summer 2001, titled Voss. And Dior Haute Couture Fall-Winter 1998 by John Galliano.

 

If you could make any fashion wish come true, what would it be?

I would love to build a vast, warehouse-like museum – not pristine and sterile, but raw and alive – that houses the costumes, objects, and artifacts of every culture, from every era, side by side.

 


This interview has been lightly edited. 

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