“It was her best collection yet,” reverberated between the walls of the Eternity Yacht as it returned to the South Street Seaport following Kim Shui’s Fall/Winter 2026 runway show during New York Fashion Week. Weeks earlier, the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund alumna was inducted into the CFDA’s first class of new member designers in five years, and her status as a finalist for the CFDA/Genesis House AAPI Design + Innovation Grant had earned her eponymous label a $40,000 development prize.
For fashion week, Shui regaled audience members with a 41-look collection that represented the culmination of her recent accolades. Having recently developed a capsule rooted in heritage for the CFDA/Genesis House grant, the designer was reading Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World when inspiration for the crux of this collection struck.
“I was doing more research on traditional Chinese and Mongolian costumes and symbols,” Shui told Surface. “It’s something that I’ve looked at since the very beginning and you see those traces, we just used it in a more artisanal way this time.” That knotting, or zhōngguó jié, appears throughout the collection: as contrast embellishment on miniskirts and waistlines, but also as entirely hand-sewn bralettes, corsets, and evening gowns.
And then, there was the attitude. It’s one thing to see the collection’s ankle-length belted fur coat, iridescent plunge-neck gown, and V-waist leather pant-and-corset ensemble hanging on studio racks for retailers to peruse post-fashion week. It’s another thing to be mesmerized by the vampy show closer sauntering down the runway in a three-piece fringe and tassel lingerie set with an oxblood lip and a cigarette holder in hand as The Fifth Element’s “Diva Dance” bumps in the background. “She carried,” Shui says of the model tasked with bearing the runway show’s finale look.
If any singular moment embodies Shui’s development as a designer, it’s this one. “[Kim’s] first runway as a member reflects the momentum she’s been building for years,” CFDA President and CEO Steven Kolb told Surface. “Her induction as a CFDA Member is a natural next step. Through her participation in programs including the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund and the CFDA Genesis House AAPI Design + Innovation initiative, she has demonstrated creativity and a personal point of view.” And, in fact, across those 41 looks, she managed to bridge luxury department store appeal and red carpet potential with a cohesive vision that offered something for the downtown it-girl set and Grammy-winners who have her pieces on rotation—and the women who talk about them.
See more of the collection below.
