Kim Shui

Kim Shui was founded in 2017 in New York by Chinese-American designer Kim Shui after her Central Saint Martins MA graduation. The brand has been one of the defining post-2017 NYC-anchored Chinese-American contemporary-luxury-womenswear brands, with the deliberately-Asian-American feminine-streetwear vocabulary anchored to the iconic Kim Shui body-conscious mesh-and-lace silhouette anchoring the broader brand cultural position. The Kim Shui vocabulary settled around several recurring elements: hand-printed mesh-and-lace dresses with deliberately-body-conscious construction (the brand's defining product category since 2017 — the iconic Kim Shui Mesh Bodycon dress has been the brand's anchoring product), hand-printed silk and cotton dresses with deliberately-Asian-American-aesthetic motif references, deconstructed denim with deliberately-body-conscious cut-out detailing, deliberately-architectural cotton-and-linen ready-to-wear, and a colour palette anchored to washed-pink, oxblood, ecru, soft-yellow, washed-cream, plus the brand's recurring use of saturated red, electric-blue, and the iconic Asian-American-feminine-aesthetic colour combinations. The brand has presented at New York Fashion Week each season since 2018. The brand is independent and held by Shui. Kim Shui operates with no permanent retail of its own, distributing through SSENSE, MATCHES, Net-a-Porter, Lane Crawford, the Boontheshop network in Seoul, the Webster, the major US-and-Asian luxury department stores, and a curated set of contemporary-luxury-womenswear specialty retailers globally. The brand has been one of the defining post-2017 Chinese-American NYC-anchored 'Asian-American-feminine-streetwear-luxury' brands.