From Harbin to the Met Gala — how aespa’s luminous main vocal became the face of Gucci, the jewel of Bvlgari, and the soul of a generation
She sits still — impossibly still — as though she were sculpted from the same dark teal as the wall behind her. Black jacket. Black nails resting against chrome. Eyes that carry a whole world inside them. This is NINGNING, and she is exactly where she was always supposed to be.
I. The Girl from Harbin
Ning Yizhuo was nine years old when she first sang on national television.
Standing on the stage of China’s Got Talent Season 2 in 2011, small-shouldered and focused, she delivered a performance that already felt too assured, too inhabited, for someone so young.
That is the thing about Ningning: she has never seemed to be practising. She has only ever seemed to be arriving.
Born on October 23, 2002, in Harbin — a city in northeastern China where the winters are long and severe and the architecture carries the memory of something older — Ningning grew up inside a household that understood artistry as a daily language.
Born on October 23, 2002, in Harbin — a city in northeastern China where the winters are long and severe and the architecture carries the memory of something older — Ningning grew up inside a household that understood artistry as a daily language.
Her mother was a musician. Her father was an architect and designer. She absorbed both: the emotional precision of one, and the structural eye of the other. By the time she was a teenager performing Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” at the Harbin Silver Valley Fuxing Concert, she was already a complete performer, not a work in progress.
That performance caught the attention of SM Entertainment scouts. In 2016, at thirteen years old, she joined the company’s prestigious pre-debut training program SMROOKIES — and then trained, with extraordinary patience, for five years.
The longest trainee period in aespa’s eventual lineup.
That patience, that willingness to wait for the right moment and to use that time to deepen rather than rush — it feels in retrospect like a core piece of who she is.
II. Black Mamba and the Birth of the Metaverse Idol
On November 17, 2020, aespa debuted with “Black Mamba” — and broke the record for the highest number of views on a debut day for a K-pop group’s music video. Twenty-one point four million views in twenty-four hours. The world had not been expecting them, and then suddenly it couldn’t look away.
aespa’s concept was singular: four real-world members — Karina, Giselle, Winter, and Ningning — alongside four virtual AI avatars known as æ-aespa, dwelling in a parallel dimension called KWANGYA. It was K-pop’s first genuine metaverse narrative, years before “metaverse” became a buzzword in every boardroom in Silicon Valley. SM Entertainment had constructed a mythology, and these four young women were the living, breathing proof that it worked.
For Ningning, the debut placed her immediately at the gravitational centre of the group’s sound. As aespa’s main vocal — the first Chinese main vocalist in a K-pop girl group — her role was not just to sing but to anchor. To be the voice you feel in your ribcage. And she was. On “Next Level,” the group’s sleek, strutting 2021 breakthrough, her lines rang like something struck from precious metal.
On the Savage EP that autumn — which sold nearly 800,000 copies and became SM Entertainment’s best-selling debut album at the time — her control was surgical and deeply felt.
What’s important to understand about Ningning’s early career is the sheer pace of aespa’s rise. “Girls” in 2022 debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200. Their EP My World in 2023 set a new first-day sales record for a K-pop girl group with over 1.8 million pre-orders.
They headlined festivals. They performed at Coachella, at Governors Ball, at Outside Lands. And through it all, Ningning was the voice that people carried home with them — replaying in the ear long after the set was over.
III. Fashion as Second Language
There is a moment in the Marie Claire China shoot that says everything. Ningning in tobacco-tan suede — jacket, cargo skirt, knee-high stiletto boots, all Gucci — leaning back against a chair with the easy confidence of a woman who has never needed to explain herself. A Gucci monogram bag hangs from one hand. She glances over her shoulder with an expression that lands somewhere between invitation and dare. The camera, one imagines, slightly loses its nerve.
Fashion arrived in Ningning’s professional life before Gucci did. In February 2024, she was appointed Global Brand Ambassador for Versace — becoming the first female K-pop celebrity to hold that title for the Italian house.
Donatella Versace herself praised her as someone with “a strong, confident vision, incredible energy and talent.” Ningning wore the words like they’d been tailored specifically to her measurements.
What followed was a masterclass in building a fashion identity alongside a music career rather than beside it. She fronted Versace’s Kleio bag campaign. She appeared in Maybelline New York’s North and Southeast Asian ambassador campaigns. She was named global ambassador for Alo. She modelled for Dr. Jart+ and Matin Kim. Each partnership felt coherent, considered, like chapters in a style autobiography rather than a random ledger of deals.
IV. Gucci — A Century Meets Its Muse
When Gucci announced NINGNING as its newest Global Brand Ambassador in late April 2026, the fashion world nodded with the quiet satisfaction of something inevitable finally being confirmed. The relationship had been building in plain sight: she had appeared front row at Gucci’s Autumn/Winter 2026 Primavera show during Milan Fashion Week, and the early campaign images had already circulated through the fashion ecosystem with the speed of something people genuinely wanted to share.
The appointment completed something elegant about aespa as a collective luxury force. Karina had been with Prada since 2024. Winter had anchored Polo Ralph Lauren. Giselle had shot LOEWE’s spring/summer 2026 campaign.
And now Ningning — the voice, the youngest, the one who waited five years in training — carried the Gucci house into the orbit of the next generation.
Gucci’s logic in choosing her is not difficult to read. The House has over a century of artisanal history, and its current creative direction under Demna is one of eclectic, expressive energy — an aesthetic that refuses to be simply one thing. Ningning, in this sense, is a perfect alignment: she is the main vocal but also the group comedian, the girl who posts the most chaotic updates on Weibo and then walks a red carpet as though she invented elegance. She contains multitudes in a way that luxury, at its most vibrant, always has.
The Met Gala 2026, held in the first week of May, provided the partnership’s most cinematic moment so far.
Ningning arrived in a custom black Gucci gown — structured, intricate, dramatic in the way that truly earned the word.
Bvlgari jewellery completed the look: jewels that glowed against the dark fabric like stars against the kind of sky you only see far from city light.
It was, by every account, a debut that nobody in the room forgot.
The Bvlgari pieces throughout the shoot — necklaces, ear cuffs, layered across looks that move from deep-night black to warm suede daylight — speak the same visual language as Ningning’s own aesthetic evolution: maximalist in presence, precise in detail, impossible to ignore.
V. Bvlgari — The Jewels That Speak for Her
To understand why Bvlgari and NINGNING work as a pairing, you have to understand what fine jewellery does in the language of fashion editorial. It is not decoration. It is punctuation. It is the note held after the song is technically over — the resonance that lingers and tells you what the piece was really about.
Bvlgari’s Serpenti collection — the coiled serpent, ancient symbol of wisdom and transformation — winds through this Marie Claire China issue with particular intention. The snake, as a motif, has long carried its own mythology in art, religion, and fashion. Here, on Ningning, it carries something more specific: the story of a girl who trained in silence for years, who waited and worked, and who has now arrived at the precise moment the world was ready for her. The serpent does not rush. It arrives when it means to.
The Bvlgari pieces throughout the shoot — necklaces, ear cuffs, layered across looks that move from deep-night black to warm suede daylight — speak the same visual language as Ningning’s own aesthetic evolution: maximalist in presence, precise in detail, impossible to ignore.
VI. Lemonade, the World Tour, and What Comes Next
aespa’s second full-length album, Lemonade, drops May 29, 2026 — and everything in the promotional run has suggested something that both honours and transcends where the group began.
The 10-track album, arriving roughly two years after debut album Armageddon reached No. 25 on the Billboard 200, promises aespa at their most self-assured: sharper storytelling, evolved production, and the kind of confidence that only comes from years of doing the work in rooms around the world.
The single “Attitude,” released in March, was a statement of exactly that — a word that, in NINGNING’s case, arrives not as posture but as earned authority.
She co-wrote her solo concert stage track “Bored!” (performed during the 2024 tour), and her desire to explore R&B in her eventual solo work speaks to a musical interiority that her aespa duties only partially reveal. She plays piano and guitar. She has been singing since she was five. The music has always been, in the most literal sense, her first language.
Following Lollapalooza in August — aespa’s debut at the legendary festival — the group embarks on a world tour that will run through early 2027. This is what scale looks like for K-pop’s most globally-oriented fourth-generation act: not a world tour as aspiration, but as the natural consequence of where they already are.
In 2025, aespa were recognised as Group of the Year at the Billboard Women in Music Awards. At those same awards, Ningning cited Doechii as a dream collaborator.
It is a pairing that makes a certain kind of sense: two artists who carry enormous vocal and sonic ambition, who operate in genres that prize narrative as much as sound, who are wholly themselves in a landscape that makes pressure to be someone else feel constant.
VII. The Cultural Bridge
It would be a mistake to discuss NINGNING without discussing what she represents as a Chinese artist within a South Korean entertainment industry — and what she means to the hundreds of millions of fans across Mandarin-speaking markets who see themselves in her story. She is trilingual,
Fluent in Mandarin, Korean, and English. She is, as her group has always described her, a bridge — not a token, not a concession, but a genuine gravitational point connecting different audiences to a shared experience.
Her Weibo presence is enormous. Her Chinese fanbase, known affectionately as NingMeng (combining her name with the Mandarin word for “lemon”), has driven extraordinary engagement across every campaign she has been part of.
When Gucci launched her as ambassador, the announcement did not just circulate in K-pop spaces — it moved through luxury fashion media, through Chinese entertainment platforms, through the intersecting digital communities where music and fashion and identity are all discussed in the same breath. This is what makes the Marie Claire China placement feel particularly resonant. It is not merely a K-pop star in a fashion magazine. It is a story told in the right language, for the right audience, about a woman from Harbin who became, without ever seeming to announce it, one of the defining creative presences of her generation.
Epilogue: What Feels Real
At the end of the Gucci ambassador announcement, NINGNING offered a sentence that has circulated endlessly since: “I have been drawn to Gucci since I was young, and the idea of now bringing its style to a new generation and people with all kinds of tastes still feels unreal.”
What’s striking about those words is not the modesty, which is conventional. What’s striking is the phrase “still feels unreal” — as though she expected the feeling of arrival to eventually settle into something ordinary, and it hasn’t. That, perhaps, is what keeps her performing with the urgency she does. The world has caught up with the girl from Harbin. And she is just beginning to understand how far she can take it.
Lemonade drops May 29. The world tour begins in August. The jewels on the cover shoot catch the light in a way that photographs can barely contain. And NINGNING — in black, in suede, in the particular stillness of someone who has finally arrived — continues to look like exactly what she is: the future, dressed for the present.
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Credits & Rights
Published in: Marie Claire China (嘉人) · May 2026 Issue
Talent: NINGNING (宁艺卓) / aespa · SM Entertainment
Fashion: Gucci (Global Brand Ambassador Partnership)
Jewellery:Bvlgari (Serpenti & High Jewellery Collections)
Styling:Jung Hyun-ah
Hair & Makeup: NINGNING Glam Team, SM Entertainment
Editorial: Kpoppie Magazine Editorial Team
Producer:Velocity Entertainment Inc. Japan / New Zealand
Creative Direction:Kpoppie Magazine x Marie Claire China Studio
Digital Edition: Kpoppie Magazine Digital, May 2026
© 2026 Kpoppie Magazine / Velocity Entertainment Inc. Japan / New Zealand. All rights reserved. This article was produced in collaboration with Marie Claire China (嘉人) for the May 2026 issue. All editorial content, photography, and creative direction are the property of their respective rights holders. NINGNING is represented by SM Entertainment. Gucci and Bvlgari imagery used under license for editorial and promotional purposes.
Kpoppie Magazine is a publication of Velocity Entertainment Inc. — Japan & New Zealand.