ATTEMPT

ATTEMPT was founded in 2015 in Shanghai by Chinese designer Yushan Li as a contemporary luxury menswear brand specifically focused on what Li described as 'a deliberately-Chinese architectural-tailoring vocabulary anchored to traditional Chinese textile and dyeing craft.' The brand has been one of the defining post-2015 Shanghai-anchored contemporary-luxury-menswear brands, with the deliberately-Chinese-craft visual culture anchoring the broader brand cultural position. The ATTEMPT vocabulary settled around several recurring elements: deconstructed Chinese-cotton and Italian-mill wool tailored separates with deliberately-Chinese-cultural-reference proportional construction, hand-printed silk and cotton shirts with traditional Chinese textile-pattern references, the brand's iconic Chinese-traditional-dyeing programme (using traditional Chinese natural dyes including indigo, gardenia, and madder), and a colour palette anchored to natural-indigo, washed-cream, oxblood, ecru, washed-charcoal, plus the brand's recurring use of traditional-Chinese-dye colour combinations and natural-undyed cotton tones. The brand has presented at Shanghai Fashion Week each season since 2017. The brand is independent and held by Li. ATTEMPT operates flagship retail in Shanghai (Anfu Road — the brand's home neighbourhood) plus international wholesale through SSENSE, MATCHES, Dover Street Market, GR8, Lane Crawford, Boontheshop, the Webster, and a curated set of contemporary-luxury-menswear specialty retailers globally. The brand has been one of the more quietly disciplined post-2015 Shanghai-anchored 'Chinese-craft-revival' menswear brands, with the deliberately-traditional-Chinese-dyeing positioning specifically anchoring the brand inside the broader 'cross-cultural-luxury-fashion' conversation that has been continuously rewritten since 2018.