Pronounce

Pronounce was founded in 2015 in Milan by Yushan Li and Jun Zhou, two Chinese-born designers who met as students at Istituto Marangoni Milan. The brand's premise is the literal pronouncing of Chinese culture for an international audience — taking decorative motifs from Chinese opera, traditional silhouettes from cheongsam and changshan tailoring, and Chinese craft techniques, and re-engineering them within an Italian-tailoring framework. The vocabulary is distinctly its own: oversized silk shirts with hand-embroidered traditional motifs (clouds, dragons, peonies), deconstructed Mao-collar jackets, jacquard suiting that references Chinese imperial robes, and a colour palette borrowed from Chinese landscape painting (mineral green, lacquer red, ink black). The brand has shown at Milan Fashion Week men's since 2018 and won the LVMH Prize semi-finalist position in 2019 and the BoF China Prize in 2020. Pronounce operates from Milan and Shanghai. Production is split between Italian ateliers and Chinese craft workshops the brand works with directly. The brand is independent. Li and Zhou continue as co-creative directors. Few Chinese-Italian designers have built such a coherent dialogue between the two textile traditions — and few have positioned themselves at the men's fashion mid-luxury tier as definitively as Pronounce.