For two evenings in mid-April 2026, the Sui-Tang dynasty imperial pool at the heart of Luoyang’s old city became a runway. The 2026 Luoyang Hanfu Fashion Week, themed “Peony Culture and Fashion,” took over the Jiuzhou Pool archaeological site — the excavated remains of the Sui and Tang imperial pleasure garden — with a 100-meter catwalk, two flagship hanfu brand showcases, a non-heritage craft market, and an awards ceremony that drew designers, hanfu enthusiasts, and tourism industry representatives from across the country.
Jiuzhou Pool sits inside the larger Sui-Tang Luoyang City heritage park, the archaeological core of the old capital that served as China’s political center from the late 6th to the early 10th century. The pool itself, with its reconstructed timber halls and stone-paved courts, is one of the most-photographed hanfu backdrops in the country, and the choice of venue was a deliberate signal that the Luoyang Hanfu Fashion Week is positioning itself as the cultural flagship of the city’s “Hanfu City 2.0” initiative, a 2026 program that aims to convert the city’s already-substantial hanfu industry into a full cultural-and-industrial ecosystem.
The opening showcase was anchored by two established hanfu brands. Weijie, a Shanghai-based label known for its Song-dynasty-leaning everyday hanfu, and Jianshang Yun, a regular on the China International Fashion Week circuit whose work is built around the slogan “inherit with love, cut with heart,” and which specializes in bringing traditional Chinese clothing elements into daily wardrobe pieces. The Jianshang Yun segment leaned into the Tang dynasty register, with wide-sleeved robes, high-waisted chest-ruqun silhouettes, and embroidered peony motifs designed to evoke the classical line “clouds look like clothes, flowers look like face” from Li Bai’s “Qingping Diao.”
Beyond the catwalk, the event hosted a static sales exhibition that drew heritage-fashion brands from Wuhan, Luoyang, and other cities — covering new-Chinese-style hanfu, peony-themed everyday wear, and local Luoyang non-heritage accessories, with a “show-and-sell” model that allowed visitors to buy pieces straight off the runway. The format is significant: most Chinese hanfu industry events have separated the showcase from the retail floor; combining them is part of Luoyang’s effort to push the hanfu market from a hobbyist subculture into a normalized category of the urban wardrobe.
For the broader new Chinese style market, the Luoyang Fashion Week is a marker of how far the city has come in three years. Local government data cited in March 2026 reporting show that the number of hanfu retailers in Luoyang’s old city grew from fewer than 20 in late 2022 to more than 1,300 in early 2026 — a 70-fold increase. The Luoyang Peony Culture Festival in 2026 drew 10.3 million visitors and 8.29 billion yuan in tourism revenue, up 1.69 percent and 5.72 percent year-on-year respectively. Luoyang Yi (Luoyi) Ancient City, the city’s central heritage-tourism district, has now hosted more than 60 million cumulative visitors since opening, with a single-day peak of 206,000. Two national hanfu industry standards — the Hanfu Design General Rules and the Hanfu Terminology Standard — were issued under Luoyang’s lead in late 2024, and the 2026 “Hanfu City 2.0” plan is built on top of that regulatory foundation. The April fashion week, in other words, is the visible tip of a much larger industrial strategy.