PRONOUNCE is looking at menswear through her eyes

For its tenth anniversary, the Shanghai-founded label introduced womenswear with a collection that reconsidered the relationship between masculine tailoring, feminine identity and the freedom to dress somewhere in between

Fashion has spent years borrowing from menswear, but borrowing is not quite the same thing as belonging. A woman in an oversized suit is hardly a radical proposition in 2026, yet much of the conversation around gender-fluid dressing still revolves around taking familiar masculine garments and adjusting them for a female customer. For Yushan Li and Jun Zhou, the designers behind PRONOUNCE, the challenge is more interesting: what happens when a label that has spent a decade developing its identity through menswear begins to consider the world from a woman's perspective?

Their answer arrived at Shanghai Fashion Week with Through Her Eyes, a collection marking PRONOUNCE's tenth anniversary and its first dedicated womenswear presentation. Although shown during the city's Spring/Summer 2027 fashion-week calendar, the collection is classified as Pre-Fall 2027, an important distinction for a label whose latest chapter is as much about expanding its identity as presenting another season.

Founded in 2016, PRONOUNCE has built an international reputation around a distinctive approach to contemporary Chinese design. Its collections have frequently explored the relationship between traditional craftsmanship and modern construction, drawing on Chinese cultural references without reducing them to decorative motifs. The label's menswear has also demonstrated an interest in softer proportions, unusual fabric treatments and silhouettes that resist rigid definitions of masculinity.

That history makes the introduction of womenswear particularly compelling. PRONOUNCE is not starting from a conventional understanding of men's clothing and attempting to make it feminine. The designers have already spent years questioning what masculine dressing can look like. Womenswear offers an opportunity to develop that conversation from another direction.

A different perspective on familiar clothes

Through Her Eyes explores the space between masculine and feminine codes through garments that emphasize movement, layering and the relationship between structure and softness. Tailoring remains central to the collection, but its authority is reconsidered through proportion and styling rather than simply reproduced in smaller sizes.

There is an important difference between designing clothes for women and developing a distinctly feminine aesthetic. The former can accommodate an enormous range of identities, preferences and attitudes toward the body. PRONOUNCE's approach is interesting because it suggests that the familiar language of tailoring, traditionally associated with masculine authority, can become something more fluid when approached without those inherited assumptions.

The collection also builds on the designers' longstanding interest in cultural exchange. Li and Zhou have worked between Chinese and international fashion contexts, developing a design language that combines craftsmanship, contemporary street influences and an appreciation for the expressive possibilities of clothing. Their work has never fitted neatly into the expectation that Chinese designers must demonstrate cultural authenticity through immediately recognizable historical references.

That independence becomes particularly valuable in womenswear, where the pressure to establish a recognizable commercial identity can encourage designers to settle quickly into familiar categories. PRONOUNCE already possesses a distinctive vocabulary. The challenge is to expand it without losing the characteristics that made the label interesting in the first place.

Beyond the familiar gender-fluid wardrobe

The fashion industry has become comfortable describing collections as gender-fluid, although the term is often applied to little more than oversized tailoring and garments that could plausibly be worn by anyone. The more meaningful question concerns how designers reconsider the assumptions built into clothing itself.

PRONOUNCE's womenswear debut offers an opportunity to examine that distinction. Rather than presenting femininity as the opposite of masculinity, Through Her Eyes treats the relationship between the two as something open to interpretation. The collection's significance lies less in the novelty of women wearing menswear-inspired clothing than in the designers' attempt to reconsider their established creative language through a different perspective.

There is also a commercial dimension to the decision. Introducing womenswear allows PRONOUNCE to reach a broader audience at a moment when Shanghai's independent fashion ecosystem is becoming increasingly sophisticated. Yet expansion brings expectations, particularly for a label whose identity has been built over a decade. The challenge will be developing a womenswear proposition that feels genuinely necessary rather than simply extending an existing brand into another category.

For now, the collection represents a thoughtful starting point. PRONOUNCE has spent ten years developing a recognizable approach to construction, cultural references and contemporary masculinity. Its womenswear debut suggests that those ideas have room to evolve without requiring the designers to abandon their original identity.

The most interesting part of Through Her Eyes is not that PRONOUNCE has finally begun designing for women. It is that the label appears interested in what women might reveal about the clothes it has been making all along.