In Austerity, Brands Bet on Exhibitions to Reach China’s ‘Forgotten’ Middle Class
LONDON — 2025 appears to be the year of adjustment for the luxury industry in China. What came after mega runway shows and supersized flagship openings in China from the pandemic era were small and beautiful exhibitions for the masses.
In March alone, brands including Penhaligon’s, Gucci and Loro Piana are hosting public-facing exhibitions around Shanghai Fashion Week to capture the influx of local and international attention.
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It was almost a 180 from the trend of hosting lavish, exclusive events to entertain VICs, hoping they would snatch up big-ticket items just because they could.
It’s becoming clear that China‘s aspirational luxury shoppers are back in the game. Many consider them key to tackling luxury’s slumping sales in 2025 and beyond. A well-curated exhibition can help reinforce a brand’s heritage and core strength, and improve sales in the long run.
Running from March 25 to April 1, Penhaligon’s will debut its exhibition “Eau So British” in Shanghai, detailing the brand’s 155-year history with archive items and images, a founder’s story and royal connection, and showcase Chinese artist He Xian’s interpretations of the brand and its products.
For Gucci, while it remains to be seen where the brand is heading under the leadership of new artistic director Demna, the brand is looking to focus the current narrative on its house icon: bamboo.
Set to be unveiled at Shanghai‘s historic mansion Sunke Villa, the exhibition “Gucci Bamboo: Decoding an Icon” will be open to the public free of charge from April 1 to April 6. Visitors can secure a slot to visit on WeChat’s Mini Program.
According to Gucci, the exhibition will guide visitors through the bag’s evolution, unveil its meticulous techniques and forge an artistic narrative to explain its lasting appeal. Curated by the Milan-based multidisciplinary studio 2050+, it will include installations and artworks that pay tribute to “the enduring influence of bamboo as a material of strength, resilience and elegance.”
The Gucci exhibition will come at a time when the brand has been scaling back its retail network across China.
Earlier this year, the brand closed two street-facing stores in Shanghai: one in the Réel department store on the prominent Nanjing West Road overlooking the latest Casa Loewe, and one in the tourists-filled Shanghai New World Daimaru on Nanjing East Road by the Bund.
It has also shuttered four underperforming stores in lower-tier cities, one in Taiyuan, Shenyang, Dalian and Fuzhou, respectively.
Bringing itself closer to its Chinese “connoisseur” and expanding upon Loro Piana’s cultural narrative, Loro Piana, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton’s poster child for quiet luxury, also unveiled its first exhibition “If You Know, You Know. Loro Piana’s Quest for Excellence” on March 22 in China at Shanghai‘s Museum of Art Pudong, a massive white box structure overlooking the storied Huangpu River.
Running until May 5, the retrospective, part of the Italian luxury house’s centennial celebration, is a comprehensive and sensory-friendly experience that fans out across 1,000 square meters, telling the story of the brand’s family legacy, textile know-how, fashion prowess, its links to China and its devotion to the art world in 15 galleries.
In China, the brand counts 41 doors in mainland China and has been doubling down on its clientele business with the opening of its first VIC salon at Shanghai’s Plaza 66, where exclusive products, produced in “very, very small quantity,” are available, according to Damien Bertrand, chief executive officer at Loro Piana, who is soon to become deputy CEO of Louis Vuitton.
In 2024, some 192 exhibitions were organized by 48 luxury fashion, watches and jewelry, and beauty brands in China, according to Jonathan Siboni, founder and CEO of Luxurynsight, which provides luxury, fashion and beauty brands with data-driven insights.
Siboni said the rise of exhibitions in China is driven by a combination of cultural, economic and strategic factors.
First of all, an exhibition provides an engaging way to connect with consumers beyond traditional retail to showcase craftsmanship, heritage and creativity in an experiential rather than a purely transactional way.
He also noticed that China’s growing cultural confidence has fueled interest in traditional craftsmanship and local artistic heritage. Brands like Loewe have successfully embraced this trend by spotlighting artisanal crafts, such as ceramics, in the “Crafted World” exhibition at Shanghai Exhibition Center.
Secondly, with major luxury players reporting slowing sales in China, Siboni observed that brands are looking for innovative ways to maintain their desirability.
Large-scale exhibitions create exclusivity and excitement, attracting high-net-worth individuals who appreciate both luxury and art.
“Luxury exhibitions serve as a cultural bridge, transforming the way Chinese consumers perceive brands. While the volume of brand exhibitions in China suggests a possible saturation point, our data showed that there were as many exhibitions in the first two months of 2025 as in 2024 and a few factors confirm that this is more than just a passing trend,” Siboni said.
Judith Clark, curator of the Loro Piana exhibition, confirmed that China has been a hot bed for fashion exhibitions in recent years, and brands are not afraid to experiment.
With Loro Piana, she treated the exhibition as an avant-garde project, playing with the idea of museum practice in new ways.
“It was certainly part of the agreement that it would be not highlighting product, that it would be about process, that it would be about history, so I took that very seriously,” Clark said of her curatorial approach.
“And then there’s the relationship with the archive, which meant going back to basics, just going in and listening to the archivist, listening to the designers, listening to the history of the company and looking at this arc of the 100 years and seeing how to tell that story in a way that is evocative and appealing to an audience,” she added.
Pooky Lee, a protegee of Clark, who now runs his own creative and curation agency Poptag in China, considers exhibition a more immersive, multipurpose means of communication.
It caters to the current market demand for experiential consumption and fulfills multiple brand needs in one go, from showcasing products, telling stories, creating visual spectacles and pleasing existing customers to attracting new ones, and providing scenarios for creating social media buzz.
“Compared with a fashion show, an exhibition has more freshness and a more lasting cycle. On the other hand, the word exhibition has become fluid and diversified. It’s no longer limited to a museum context but also welcoming surroundings like commercial spaces, therefore this gives brands more creative autonomy to customize the exhibitions as they like,” Lee added.
Still, Lee noted that to most people in China, fashion has not made its way into conventional museums and other public cultural spaces.
While there have been institution-led projects such as the Power Station of Art Museum in Shanghai and Design Society in Shenzhen hosting fashion exhibitions for academic research, such as solo exhibitions of designers Hussein Chalayan and Viktor & Rolf, and group exhibitions to study the influence of nature on fashion design, most of the fashion exhibitions that the public is familiar with are led by a single brand, which would influence the curatorial style and audience expectations.
“For example, last year’s Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel exhibition at Power Station of Art was essentially a touring exhibition led by Palais Galliera Paris, sponsored by Chanel, but viewers would compare it to Chanel’s past commercial exhibitions, and complain that the former was not as entertaining as the latter,” Lee pointed out.
He also cautioned that brands shouldn’t pursue too much in the form and neglect the actual core content of an exhibition.
“I remember a few years ago when I visited a particularly experimental exhibition in Shanghai by an Italian brand. There were no physical works in the exhibition, it was all digital content such as video and interactive content played on the screen. It was very confusing, at least to me, and there was a kind of absurdity to it,” he added.
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