Recently, the 2026 Donghua University × COACH "CHINA COOL" Circular Fashion Design Exhibition, co-hosted by Donghua University and COACH, a brand under Tapestry Group, made its debut at THE SEED, a zero-carbon building in West Bund, Xuhui District, Shanghai.
This year's "CHINA COOL" project centered on circular fashion design. Starting from material innovation, Donghua University students carried out creative practices around the reuse and circular transformation of waste materials, integrating circular material application, aesthetic expression, and artistic installations. By observing and responding to local culture and contemporary lifestyles, the students translated the concept of sustainability into works that combine design value with social reflection, spanning sustainable apparel, artistic installations, and other forms, demonstrating the rich possibilities of circular design in the contemporary context. Throughout the project, the students addressed real industry challenges through interdisciplinary collaboration, deepened their understanding of the fashion industry chain and sustainable development in practice, and further explored pathways for young design talent to engage in industrial transformation and sustainable innovation.
The exhibition featured 20 groups of creative works by students from Shanghai International College of Fashion and Innovation and the College of Fashion and Design from Donghua University. The works explored themes such as Eastern mythology, Song brocade, marine ecology, and zodiac culture. Using COACH products as their creative medium, these young designers from Donghua University boldly deconstructed and meticulously reassembled them. Drawing inspiration from contemporary youth culture and lifestyles, they transformed the concept of circularity into tangible, innovative expressions. While responding to industry challenges, they endowed “guochao” with a new design language, allowing fashion and art to meet in regeneration.
“Young students continue to break through existing frameworks, demonstrating the strength of the new generation of design with vibrant and forward-looking creative expressions,” said Lilian Li, President of COACH China. “In this year’s project, we encouraged participants to explore collaboratively from the perspectives of design innovation, material application, and creative methods, translating the concept of sustainability into perceivable, discussable, and understandable real-world pathways through diverse practices and expressions, bringing it into greater public view.”
Li Jun, Dean of the Shanghai International College of Fashion and Innovation, remarked: "Through real-world circular fashion propositions, students confront market challenges in their creative work. The university and the enterprise have broken through the traditional framework of industry-education cooperation, responding to transformations in the fashion industry through circular fashion innovation. Guided by solving practical industry problems, we have developed an 'academia + industry + art' talent cultivation system.
This year marks the sixth year of the collaborative co-creation project between Donghua University and COACH. Over the past six years, the project has reached more than 500 design students, incubated over 70 groups of works, some of which have won international awards and been included in COACH's creative archive. The design discipline at Donghua University is guided by Shanghai-style fashion, ethnic art, and apparel design, striving to promote the deep integration of traditional culture and fashion design, actively cultivating new fashion technologies and formats with "Donghua characteristics," and endeavoring to create new disciplinary growth points. In doing so, it actively contributes its wisdom and strength to Shanghai’s efforts to become a capital of design, fashion, and brands, as well as to build a pilot zone for the best practices of Xi Jinping’s Thought on Culture.
