SHANGHAI — Vogue China has named Tim Lim, the well-known journalist, stylist and creative director, its new executive creative director as part of legacy fashion media’s adjustment to China‘s structural market shift, WWD has learned.
The editor has already joined the official Vogue China WeChat group and was seen at a company Chinese New Year gathering.
Lim’s first cover will be the March issue, and he will be overseeing all editorial content at Vogue China, according to people familiar with the matter.
Condé Nast on Wednesday declined to comment on Lim’s appointment.
Prior to Vogue China, Lim spent almost 20 years at Modern Media, which was renamed Meta Media in 2022.
The Shanghai-based Lim was born in Canada and completed his studies at McGill University and the Sorbonne. He began his career in Hong Kong in the late ’90s as a fashion editor at the South China Morning Post, before joining Modern Media in Shanghai in 2006.
Lim quickly rose through the ranks to become the group’s fashion director, overseeing glossies such as Modern Weekly and Numéro China, the latter launched in 2010.
He is credited with bringing an artistic voice to fashion editorials at the publications.
Together with Shaway Yeh, then group style editorial director of Modern Media, Lim transformed Modern Weekly, a regional lifestyle weekly founded by the Chinese entrepreneur Thomas Shao in 1993, into a Chinese media powerhouse known for forging creative ties with both global and Asian creatives.
An art photography collector, Lim has spearheaded projects with industry figures such as Juergen Teller, Wolfgang Tillmans, Ryan Trecartin, Ren Hang and Yang Fudong.
Notably, Lim was already experimenting with avatar designer fashion in the mid-2000s — one of his first crossovers with the art world was with Cao Fei, one of China’s most successful contemporary artists. For the project, Lim put Cao’s avatar, China Tracy, in Hussein Chalayan in Second Life, a virtual world.
Lim also tapped the American photographer Charlie Engman and his mother, Kathleen McCain Engman, to collaborate on a cover story for Modern Weekly’s biannual style supplement in 2020.
In the cover shoot, Kathleen is seen in Chanel, Shushu/Tong, Pronounce and Susan Fang looks as she immerses herself in downtown Shanghai, anticipating a broader industry shift that would later see brands like Prada, Miu Miu and Chanel cast older models on the runway.
In a recent System Magazine interview with Leslie Sun, Vogue’s APAC editorial director and head of editorial content at Vogue Taiwan, Lim summarized China’s evolving consumer perspective as having “a growing Asian confidence” and “a regional assertiveness.”
“That is exciting. More dialogue is happening on equal footing with the West,” Lim said in the System Magazine interview. “People are now much more inward-looking, focusing on figures from their own pop cultural landscape.
“We’ve never really been about ‘Buy this, look rich, be cool.’ That’s never been how I’ve approached my job. It’s more about celebrating creation and showing how fashion can be a form of expression,” Lim added.
Lim’s move to Vogue China is a part of a larger shift happening in editorial leadership in Chinese fashion media. In early February, Yeh joined Huasheng Media Group to oversee content-led brand initiatives across Europe and Southeast Asia for Chinese editions of T Magazine, Wallpaper, Another Man and more.
A week later, Dan Cui, known for his work at GQ China, was named Huasheng Media’s Group editor in chief, overseeing Another China and Another Man China, with Monica Mong appointed editor in chief for Another China and Jeff Lee as fashion director.
