Sankuanz

SANKUANZ was founded in 2013 in Xiamen, China by Chinese designer Shangguan Zhe as a contemporary luxury menswear brand specifically focused on what Shangguan described as 'a deliberately-Chinese conceptual menswear vocabulary anchored to traditional Chinese cultural archives and contemporary Chinese-mainland youth-culture references.' The brand has been one of the defining post-2013 Chinese-anchored contemporary-luxury-menswear brands, with the deliberately-experimental fashion-week-aesthetic positioning anchoring the broader brand cultural position. The SANKUANZ vocabulary settled around several recurring elements: deconstructed Italian-mill wool and cotton tailored separates with deliberately-Chinese-conceptual proportional construction, hand-printed silk and cotton shirts with deliberately-Chinese-cultural-reference graphic-motif references, the brand's iconic SANKUANZ technical-fabric outerwear programme (deliberately-engineered with hardware-and-strap construction referencing traditional Chinese-craft tradition), deconstructed denim with deliberately-Chinese-craft-tradition references, and a colour palette anchored to washed-black, oxblood, ecru, washed-charcoal, plus the brand's recurring use of saturated red, electric-blue, and the iconic Chinese-conceptual-menswear aesthetic colour combinations. The brand has presented at London and Paris Men's Fashion Week each season since 2015 and was an LVMH Prize semi-finalist in 2016. The brand is independent and held by Shangguan. SANKUANZ operates flagship retail in Xiamen (the brand's home flagship), Shanghai (Anfu Road), Beijing, plus international wholesale through SSENSE, MR PORTER, MATCHES, Dover Street Market, GR8, Lane Crawford, the Boontheshop network in Seoul, and a curated set of contemporary-luxury-menswear specialty retailers globally. The brand has been one of the more conceptually rigorous post-2013 Chinese-anchored 'conceptual-luxury-menswear' brands.