Some collections manage to take your on a journey with special meanings. For Spring/Summer 2027, Alice Yu starts with something more elusive: the ambiguous sense of belonging when home cannot be reduced to a single place.
Presented during Milan Fashion Week on September 23, 2026 at Romero Paprocki Gallery in Milan, Eastern Nomads unfolds across ready-to-wear and couture as a meditation on migration, memory, nature, and renewal. Yu looks toward the nomadic cultures of the East and the centuries-old movement of people across Eurasia, considering how identity survives a journey and how traditions change when carried into new landscapes.
The result feels less concerned with nostalgia than continuity. Here, heritage is mobile. A technique can cross borders, a material can acquire another meaning, and an inherited visual language can enter the present without surrendering the history held within it.
At the emotional center of the collection is a flower. Yu follows its life from bud to bloom and eventually to decay, using that natural cycle to shape the collection’s changing textures, volumes, and colors. The opening passages favor lived-in silk, raw linen, and untreated cotton, materials whose imperfect surfaces possess an immediate, tactile intimacy. As the imagined flower begins to open, the wardrobe becomes lighter and more expressive through airy cotton, chiffon, openwork lace, and dimensional embroidery.
At full bloom, silhouettes expand. Sculptural outerwear meets fluidity; transparency creates moments of vulnerability against more architectural forms; layers accumulate with an almost organic irregularity. Then comes the inevitable retreat. Washed denim, deconstructed knits, distressed treatments, and weathered surfaces suggest beauty after its pristine moment has passed. It is an evocative proposition for fashion: the idea that age, movement, and change can enrich a surface rather than diminish it.
Color traces the same arc. Clay brown, aged ivory, and olive green establish an earthy beginning before alizarin red, saffron yellow, indigo, and copper gold arrive with greater intensity. Eventually, those saturated notes recede into dusty pinks and mineral shades, as though time itself has softened the pigments.
Yet the most compelling dimension of Eastern Nomads emerges through Yu’s engagement with intangible cultural heritage. Craft is treated as active knowledge, carried by hands and preserved through making. For the designer, that philosophy has particular resonance. Educated at Istituto Marangoni in Milan, Yu established ALICEYU ATELIER in 2016 as a workshop specializing in embroidery and custom work before launching her namesake fashion house in 2017. Her practice has since moved across ready-to-wear, couture, craftsmanship, and interdisciplinary presentation, with a recurring interest in bringing historical techniques into contemporary design.
In Eastern Nomads, one of the most arresting expressions of that approach comes through Beihai shell carving, a craft whose roots connect to China’s long tradition of working with shell and whose history reaches back through centuries of decorative art.
Yu shifts the material onto the body. Shell fragments are selected for their inherent color and veining, then cut, polished, and engraved before being embroidered onto structured outerwear. Their natural luminosity gives the garments a sculptural quality, allowing light to become part of the composition. A material associated historically with decorative objects and inlay enters a different relationship with movement, proportion, and the human form.
The gesture is particularly meaningful because Beihai shell carving is recognized in China as national intangible cultural heritage. In Yu’s hands, its continuation is tied to transformation: preservation becomes something dynamic, capable of entering another context while retaining the trace of the artisanship from which it came.
Ceramics provide another unexpected point of departure. The collection turns to Jian ware from Fujian, celebrated for the extraordinary effects produced when iron-rich clay and glaze encounter the intense temperatures of the kiln. Closely associated with the Song dynasty, Jian ceramics are distinguished by surfaces whose markings emerge through the firing process, giving each piece a sense of controlled unpredictability. Yu translates that alchemy into fabric.
Across sheer, flowing material, deep indigo appears to open into fluctuating golden tones, catching and releasing light as the wearer moves. The print evokes the visual transformation of glaze under extreme heat, yet the shift from ceramic vessel to weightless textile changes the experience entirely. Solidity becomes transparency; the kiln’s mineral drama becomes something ephemeral enough to move with the body.
That tension between permanence and impermanence runs quietly throughout Eastern Nomads. Shell carries the memory of the sea. Ceramic traditions recall earth transformed by fire. Linen, silk, cotton, lace, denim, and knitwear register different states of refinement and erosion. The flower blooms knowing it will eventually fade.
And perhaps that is where Yu’s concept of the nomad becomes most persuasive. Movement does not require leaving identity behind. What is carried can change shape without losing its lineage.
It is an idea that resonates with Yu’s own creative geography. Her fashion language has developed between China and Milan, while her work has appeared at Shanghai Fashion Week and in cultural and artistic settings in China. Her European presentation history also deepened in Milan in 2026, making the city an increasingly significant setting for her dialogue between contemporary fashion and traditional craftsmanship.
For Spring/Summer 2027, that dialogue becomes unusually intimate. Eastern Nomads asks what remains when places change, materials weather, flowers wither, and generations move forward. Its answer resides in the things that travel with us: knowledge held in the hand, memory embedded in material, and techniques that continue because someone chooses to practice them again.
