Chanel at Museum of Art Pudong — Lesage: A Century of Embroidery (2026)

Museum of Art Pudong hosted a retrospective of the Lesage embroidery atelier, showing couture, tweed and interior decoration archives across four thematic galleries.

The venue

Museum of Art Pudong stands on the Lujiazui waterfront in Pudong, a pale stone-clad building by the Huangpu with galleries stacked above the river. It is a contemporary art museum built around large white-box rooms, high ceilings and controlled lighting, normally used for touring international exhibitions, photography and design shows that need neutral walls and quiet circulation between floors.

How the space was used

For this project the museum's third-floor white-box galleries were fitted with partition walls, archival vitrines and soft layered lighting rather than commercial display scenery. The rooms were divided into four narrative threads: embroidered couture, tweed, interior decoration and craft transmission. Large garments, furnishing textiles and small archive samples were placed in separate zones, with visitors moving through the sequence in historical order.

Why it works here

The museum's non-commercial, scholarly setting allows a brand archive to be read as cultural history rather than product. White-box galleries suit fragile textiles and varied object scales, and a design-literate Shanghai audience already visits the Lujiazui museum district for exhibitions of this kind, supporting a loaned-archive show with public programming.