About Dazed China

Dazed China

Dazed China is the Chinese edition of Dazed, the British youth culture magazine founded in London in 1991. Published in Shanghai, the edition was first launched in 2019 as a bimonthly print magazine with online platforms, created through a partnership between the United Kingdom's Dazed Media and YOHO! Group, one of China's leading streetwear and youth culture platforms. After its first run ended in 2021, the title was relaunched in 2026 as a quarterly magazine by Dazed Media together with Meta Media Group, with a new founding editorial team led by editor-in-chief Audrey Hu. Across both incarnations, Dazed China has presented itself as a bridge between Eastern and Western youth culture, covering fashion, art, music, film and digital culture for a generation of young Chinese readers and creators.

The parent magazine: Dazed in Britain

To understand Dazed China, it helps to understand the magazine it comes from. Dazed began in 1991 as Dazed & Confused, founded by Jefferson Hack, the photographer Rankin and Ian C Taylor while they were associated with the London College of Printing. It started life as a black-and-white folded poster before becoming a full-colour magazine promoted at London club nights. Hack, who had been a teenage journalism student when the project began, dropped out to work on it full time, and Rankin's photography gave the title a distinctive visual identity. The magazine captured the energy of 1990s London, the era later labelled Britart and Britpop, and built a reputation for championing emerging photographers, stylists, designers, musicians and writers rather than simply reporting on established stars. In February 2014 the magazine shortened its name from Dazed & Confused to Dazed. Published by Dazed Media, an independent media group working across print, digital and video, the British title became a quarterly covering music, fashion, film, art and literature, and it developed international editions in several markets, of which the Chinese edition became one of the most closely watched.

The 2019 launch with YOHO! Group

The Chinese edition was announced in April 2019, when YOHO! Group and Dazed Media announced that they had joined forces to launch Dazed China. The partnership had been facilitated by C Ventures, a venture capital fund that had backed both YOHO! and Dazed Media, and Adrian Cheng, the founder of C Ventures, was appointed chairman of Dazed China. The agreement was signed by Liang Chao, the founder of YOHO! — known informally as Mars — and Jefferson Hack, co-founder and chief executive of Dazed Media. The new title was scheduled to launch in August 2019 as a bimonthly print magazine accompanied by online platforms. At the time of the announcement, Dazed described its own print magazine as reaching a monthly audience of more than seven million tastemakers across its print, online, social and events activities, while YOHO! brought an audience described as 35 million and a reputation as an authority on streetwear culture in China. The stated ambition was explicit: to redefine global youth culture by curating stories that bridged East and West across fashion, art, music and film, bringing global resources and ideas into China while promoting China's distinctive pop and streetwear culture to the world.

The first issue at YOHOOD 2019

The first print issue of Dazed China was presented in Shanghai in September 2019, at the close of YOHOOD 2019, the Global Fashion Carnival held from 29 August to 6 September that year. The launch was treated as a fashion event in its own right: YOHO! presented the magazine as the opening of what Liang Chao called a non-traditional, fully integrated multimedia era of content plus commerce. The first issue featured young artists and celebrities from the United Kingdom, South Korea and China, among them the singer Leah Dou, the actor Zhang Yu, the model Adwoa Aboah and the actor Yoo Ah-in. That cover line-up was itself a statement of intent, placing Chinese creative figures alongside international names in a single youth-culture frame. Jefferson Hack commented at the launch on Dazed Media's approach to developing content for its audiences, while YOHO! framed the title as a channel through which Chinese streetwear and pop culture could travel outward, not merely a channel through which Western content travelled in.

Editorial approach and content

From the start, Dazed China was structured as more than a translated edition. It combined a bimonthly print magazine with online platforms, and its subject matter followed the parent brand's formula — fashion, art, music and film — filtered through Chinese youth culture. YOHO!, founded in 2005, had spent well over a decade cultivating China's high-end streetwear culture through its media, retail and lifestyle businesses, and that background shaped the edition's emphasis on streetwear, underground music and the styling culture of young urban China. The edition's first editor-in-chief, for its 2019 to 2021 run, was Wen Zang. Like the British original, which had built its name by giving early exposure to new creative talent, the Chinese edition positioned itself around discovery: new faces, new labels, new sounds and new image-makers, presented with the heavily visual, photography-led treatment that had been Dazed's signature since Rankin's earliest shoots for the London title.

YOHO! and China's streetwear generation

The choice of partner mattered to what Dazed China became. YOHO! described itself as China's largest streetwear platform, and its YOHOOD carnival had become an annual gathering for fashion followers, global brands and media professionals. By launching inside that ecosystem, Dazed China was plugged directly into the commercial and social world of Chinese streetwear — the sneaker drops, independent labels, skate and music scenes that formed much of its natural subject matter. The partnership also reflected a wider pattern in late-2010s Chinese publishing, in which international youth and fashion titles entered the market through local partners with existing audiences and retail operations, rather than through wholly owned subsidiaries. The arrangement gave the British title local distribution knowledge and an events platform, and gave YOHO! an internationally recognised editorial brand to add to its media portfolio.

The end of the first run

The first incarnation of Dazed China did not last. Reference listings for the Dazed brand record the Chinese edition's first circulation period as 2019 to 2021, after which the print edition ceased. Its closure formed part of a difficult period for licensed international magazines in China, when a number of Western youth and fashion titles that had entered the market in the late 2010s withdrew or went dormant as advertising, licensing economics and the media environment shifted. For several years, the Dazed name had no active print edition in mainland China, although the global brand continued to publish in Britain and online, and although Dazed Media's relationship with Chinese partners did not end: its collaboration with Meta Media Group, which had begun in 2017 with the launch of Nowness China, continued and would eventually provide the route back.

The 2026 relaunch with Meta Media Group

In February 2026, Dazed Media and Meta Media Group announced the relaunch of Dazed China, with the first issue of the new edition scheduled for June 2026. The relaunched title was set up differently from the YOHO! version: it was to be a standalone quarterly edition, anchored in China and produced by a local team, while remaining linked to Dazed's global network. The announcement described the venture as a new chapter in the long-term partnership between Dazed Media and Meta Media Group that had begun in 2017 with Nowness China, the Chinese edition of Dazed Media's video platform for art and culture. The new Dazed China was to feature original, locally produced content alongside stories drawn from Dazed's international network, and to focus on emerging voices across fashion, art, music, film and digital culture, tracing how Generation Z in China shapes identity and influence across platforms and borders. Dazed's own announcement presented the title as China's most exciting new Gen Z platform, built for a generation shaping culture in real time, online and offline and on its own terms.

The founding team of the new edition

The relaunch came with a named founding editorial team. Audrey Hu was appointed editor-in-chief of the new Dazed China. Jas Xue served as deputy editor and head of social media, Sharon Chiu as fashion director, and Scene Peng as art director. The structure of those appointments — a deputy role explicitly combining editorial work with social media, for example — reflected how far the business of a youth magazine had moved since 2019 toward social-first publishing. Meta Media Group, the Chinese partner, was described in the launch coverage as one of China's leading cultural media companies, and its executives framed the relaunch as an expression of a belief in youth-driven media that does not merely document culture but actively participates in shaping what comes next. Dazed Media, for its part, rooted the new edition in the parent brand's history of independent publishing and storytelling from the edge of culture.

Dazed China in the Chinese magazine market

Dazed China's two launches, seven years apart, bookend a revealing period in Chinese magazine publishing. The 2019 edition arrived at the high point of international licensing into China, when British and American youth titles sought Chinese partners and print editions; the 2026 edition returned in a more cautious quarterly format, with a local team, a social media operation built into its masthead and a remit centred on China's own creative communities rather than on imported content. The title's subject matter has remained constant — fashion, art, music, film and digital culture — and so has its intended reader: young, urban, visually literate and interested in both local scenes and global ones. As a record of how international youth media has tried, failed and tried again to establish itself in China, Dazed China's history is one of the most instructive in the modern Chinese magazine market.