Colour & Style 2024: China's Winter Wardrobe as Emotional Expression

Executive Summary#

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In China's Autumn/Winter 2023/24 apparel season, colour and styling stopped being decoration and became a form of emotional self-expression — the palette on the rack turned into a shopper's social calling card. Produced through the JD × Moojing (Mofang Insight) partnership, this study reads the season through the emotional economy: the colours consumers chose, the styling archetypes they identified with, and the self-expression narratives that shaped what they bought. Three colours led the conversation, with Maillard brown carrying 5M+ social buzz. Two styling worlds — New Chinese style (6M+ total buzz) and French elegance (3.2M+ total buzz) — anchored the season, while intellectual minimalism and genderless dressing gave it a personal edge. For brand teams, the lesson is that winter apparel in China now sells on feeling as much as on fabric.

The Palette as a Social Calling Card#

The first thing to understand about Autumn/Winter 2023/24 is that consumers were not just buying warmth — they were buying identity. Styling became a vehicle for self-expression and emotional fulfilment, and diverse palettes worked as social calling cards that signalled taste, mood, and belonging. The choice of colour carried meaning a shopper wanted others to read.

Three colours defined the season's conversation. Maillard brown — the warm, layered, dessert-inspired tone that dominated the styling discourse — carried 5M+ social buzz, by a wide margin the most-discussed hue. Grey-toned palettes, prized for their quiet versatility, carried 150K+ buzz. And Ancora Red arrived new: fashion week's hottest hue, a confident statement colour that gave the season a fresh, expressive accent. Together the three describe a spectrum from safe and understated to bold and declarative — and consumers moved fluidly across it depending on the emotion they wanted a garment to project.

Maillard brown led the season's colour conversation

Two Styling Worlds: New Chinese and French Elegance#

If colour set the mood, styling archetypes gave it a story. Two worlds framed the season, and both ran hot on social platforms.

New Chinese style led the styling conversation with 6M+ total buzz. Built on Mamian (horse-face) skirts, Zen aesthetics, and ink-wash motifs, it fused heritage silhouettes with contemporary wardrobes — a way for consumers to express cultural pride and individuality in the same outfit. Its scale of engagement made it the defining styling narrative of the season, and it pulled supply along with it as brands expanded assortments to meet the demand.

French elegance held the other pole with 3.2M+ total buzz. Where New Chinese style is expressive and rooted in place, French elegance functions as a "foolproof" reference point — timeless tailoring, restrained palettes, and an air of effortless polish that shoppers reach for when they want reliability over risk. The two archetypes were not in competition so much as two emotional registers a consumer could dress into, and the buzz data shows both drew large, engaged audiences through the fashion-week calendar.

Self-Expression: Minimalism and Genderless Dressing#

Beneath the two dominant worlds, a quieter layer of self-expression gave the season its personal edge — styling narratives that read less as trends and more as philosophies.

Intellectual minimalism carried 870K+ buzz. It reads as a considered, pared-back aesthetic — clean lines, muted tones, a wardrobe that signals thoughtfulness rather than logos. Genderless style carried 420K+ buzz, reflecting a growing comfort with dressing outside traditional silhouettes and a preference for pieces that work regardless of who wears them. Both are smaller than the headline archetypes, but their presence matters: they show that Autumn/Winter 2023/24 rewarded consumers who wanted their clothing to express a point of view, not just follow a look.

New Chinese style led the styling conversation

How Emotion Reshaped Supply#

Emotional demand did not stay on social platforms — it reshaped what brands put on the shelf. As consumers sought colours and archetypes that let them express themselves, the assortment expanded across the categories most suited to styling variety.

Between September 2023 and February 2024, seasonal supply grew across dresses, shirts, and knitwear. Shirts led the expansion at +63%, giving shoppers more canvases for palette and pattern. Knitwear grew +34%, padded jackets +27%, and dresses +15% — a broad widening of choice that mirrored the diversity of the styling conversation. The direction is clear: when colour and style become the reason to buy, brands respond by multiplying the ways a consumer can express themselves. A shirt that only covers competes on price; one that lands the season's palette and slots into an archetype competes on meaning — and that is the emotional-economy shift the whitepaper makes visible.

About the Data#

This article summarises findings from the JD × Moojing 2024 Autumn/Winter Apparel Trend Whitepaper. Data covers China's Autumn/Winter 2023/24 season (September 2023–February 2024) across online apparel sales and social-media engagement, sourced to Moojing's proprietary Mofang Insight coverage. Buzz figures reference the highest-engagement colour and styling pools per theme, not a full census, and exclude offline retail and B2B/wholesale channels. Where any yuan figures arise, currency conversion uses the 2024 average of roughly CN¥ 7.1 per US$.