Triple-Major

Triple-Major was founded by Ritchie Chan in 2009, first as a tiny shop in Beijing's Baochao Hutong and then, in 2012, moved south into its current home: a four-floor early-Republican-era house on Shaoxing Road, a short literary lane in the French Concession lined with publishing houses and second-hand bookstores. The store's name encodes its founding thesis — that 'independent fashion, design and publishing' are a single creative discipline — and the building is laid out accordingly, with menswear, womenswear and accessories interleaved with shelves of small-press art books, out-of-print design titles and exhibition catalogues. The buyer position has always been resolutely off-mainstream. Where the dominant Chinese multi-brand stores of the period were importing European luxury or Tokyo streetwear, Triple-Major was buying Christophe Lemaire (pre-Uniqlo), Walter Van Beirendonck, Craig Green, Henrik Vibskov, Berlin-based Anntian, Finnish artist-designer Daniel Palillo and London's Lazy Oaf — designers who were canon in the global avant-garde fashion press but commercially unavailable in mainland China at the time. The store also produces its own in-house Triple-Major label and a publishing arm, and has operated as a de-facto cultural embassy: Western indie-designer founders routinely stop in Shanghai for Triple-Major events, and Chinese designers use the space to test product against an international buyer's eye. For the Greater-China retail conversation, Triple-Major has been the longest-running anti-mall position in the country — a small, idiosyncratic, designer-led, off-corridor concept store that has outlasted most of the early-2010s wave of Chinese multi-brand boutiques precisely because it never tried to scale or be popular. Sixteen years on, the Shaoxing Lu store remains a required visit for any serious buyer or fashion writer passing through Shanghai.