Kering CRAFT Residency Selects Three Jewelry Designers for Cross-Disciplinary Training
Kering's inaugural CRAFT residency named three Chinese jewelry designers as fellows, including one whose work transforms endangered Yi ethnic crafts into minimalist forms.
Longhong Ziwei built her label, Soft Mountains, around a quietly radical premise: that the endangered textile and decorative traditions of China's Yi ethnic group could be distilled into minimalist jewelry. On March 30, Kering recognized that premise by naming her one of three jewelry designers in the inaugural cohort of CRAFT, its Creative Residency for Artisanship, Fashion and Technology, developed in partnership with Shanghai Fashion Week.
Ziwei joins Xu Hao of qiqi and Yu Gengyi of Midnight Opera House as the jewelry contingent within a 10-person cohort that also includes seven fashion designers. Together, the three jewelers represent the first time a major luxury conglomerate has structured a formal residency specifically to advance Chinese jewelry talent through direct atelier access and business mentoring at an international level.
The selection was not easy to earn. Kering received more than 100 applications after opening the program in December 2025. A 12-member advisory board, headlined by Gucci artistic director Demna and Chinese couturier Guo Pei, joined Kering and Shanghai Fashion Week officials in evaluating candidates on four criteria: creativity and originality, craftsmanship and product excellence, growth prospects, and what Kering described as "the embodiment of future luxury trends." Cai Jinqing, president of Kering Greater China, praised the cohort's "creative passion, distinct perspectives, outstanding abilities and exceptional potential."
The program begins in May with an opening phase in Italy, anchored by a mandatory eight-week European residency that moves through Milan and Paris before returning to Shanghai. Fellows will have hands-on access to the workshops and expertise of Kering's own luxury houses, a portfolio that on the jewelry side includes Boucheron, Pomellato, and Qeelin. Each of those ateliers brings a distinct technical vocabulary: Boucheron's stone-setting precision, Pomellato's bold color approach to gold, and Qeelin's intricate Chinese motif work in fine materials. For jewelry designers working at smaller scale, that kind of direct exposure to high-volume, high-tolerance production methods can accelerate the refinement of details that define delicate work, from micro-chain construction to finishing on thin bands and precise pavé settings.
The residency concludes with fellows presenting a final project at Shanghai Fashion Week 2027, giving the jewelry designers roughly 18 months to absorb those technical exchanges and translate them into new work presented on an international stage. For Ziwei, that means fresh tools applied to a practice already rooted in cultural preservation. Her Soft Mountains label has positioned minimalism not as a reduction of ornament but as a way of honoring inherited craft without freezing it in ethnographic amber.
That framing is increasingly relevant to how fine jewelry is evolving, particularly among designers who want work that reads as quiet and wearable every day but carries genuine material and cultural depth. Kering's decision to include three jewelry designers in a cohort otherwise dominated by fashion points to where the group sees meaningful creative growth: at the intersection of hand skill, precision technology, and stories that can travel.
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