THE STORY OF LE BARON 上海

After seven years, Le Baron Shanghai is closing. Call it “the end of an era”. Some will say that’s cliché. Others will note that the peak Le Baron era ended at least a year ago. But still, there was nothing like Le Baron before, and there can be nothing like it again, and not just because Steven Seagal AND Jean-Claude Van Damme AND Michael Jordan have partied there. People love Le Baron. People fucking hate Le Baron. On the right night, Le Baron Shanghai was the best club in the world. This is the story of how it came together and why it mattered.

Le Baron opened in 2014 to a completely different city. 

Everyone still paid in cash and flagged cabs down on the street. The Shelter was still open. People flew in and out of Shanghai all day every day. Vendors still sold fireworks in the city center. Hip hop lived underground. Music festivals happened downtown. Rules about enhancements were enforced loosely, if at all. Galleries and museums? Mostly attended by art lovers and media people. “Turn Down For What”, “Happy”, and – somehow, improbably – “All About That Bass” provided the soundtrack. 

The word “wanghong”, if it existed at all, was not in the common parlance. 

And the Le Baron that opened in 2014 was not the Le Baron of 2021. With its yonic carpet, red lights, wood dancefloor, and DJ booth tucked away in a corner and on the same level as the dancefloor, Le Baron didn’t look like any of the popular clubs of the day. It was neither Bar Rouge nor Dada. It wasn’t M2 and it wasn’t The Mansion. Many predicted they’d fail within six months – a normal lifespan for a Shanghai club. 

And even on slow nights, they still had the gall, or sense, to refuse people entry at the door. 

They didn’t play hip hop. Imagine that. DJs played disco and house, maybe a bit of pop. I can’t remember. China Social Club played sometimes. I think there was a resident from France? Maybe Ben Huang? Probably a lot of people don’t remember, and there aren’t that many photos. That was kind of a weird transition era between digital cameras and phone cameras becoming really good. 

Le Baron was a family club in those early days, even at Air Max Day parties or high-profile art events like performances by Fen Mengbo, Chen Wei installing several pieces, and Futura hosting the first Halloween party. Bartenders, industry people, DJs and DJs’ friends, brand people, and randoms made up the crowd. Folks were very enhanced. The vibe was old fashioneds, aperol spritzs, cigs (you could still smoke inside!), pianos, and polished wood. And disco. 

Alexander Wang

Crew

It was wild, though perhaps not as wild as the OG Le Baron in Paris. A whole ten years prior back in 2004, the street artist André Saraiva (aka “Mr. A”) opened a club in Paris that quickly became the place to “see and be seen”. It was like Studio 54 level, updated for the post-9/11 world. Folks like Kanye showed up and performed impromptu sets. They stayed open until 6am, seven nights a week. Straight up debauchery and hedonism, mixed with fashion and celebrity. 

BUT – and this is the crucial part –  Le Baron never put celebrities on a pedestal. Kate Moss paid for her own beers, at the bar. See, part of the bouncers job was trying to determine if you were chill enough to not lose it when some celebrity walked by. 

Paris led to Le Baron opening in Tokyo, London, and New York. Around 2009, a young Cody Allen was helping André with projects and clubs in New York and LA. Meanwhile in Paris, an even younger Victor Aime was DJing, working for Ed Banger (remember this is peak bloghouse era), and possibly moonlighting as a bouncer at club Le Montana or at special events during Paris Fashion Week. 

So in the early 2010s, after making friends with Edison Chen at a picnic, Cody starts visiting Shanghai and eventually realizes that hey, Shanghai needs a club like this: a place that plays good music but isn’t grimy, where you can also get a good cocktail. The kind of club you envision when you’re a kid and you hear the word “nightclub”, or when you read about iconic places like Studio 54, or The Haçienda, or Paradise Garage – that kind of nightclub. 

Christian Louboutin

A club that played songs when they were hot in the rest of the world, not six months later. A club where you could bring your out-of-town-friend on a Saturday and they would leave with a decent idea of what was really happening in the city, right now. A club that would eventually become the crossroads of the fashion, art, and music world in Shanghai.

Virgil Abloh

As the youngest people in the Le Baron group, Cody and Victor became friends and took on this mission together. Cody handled the business, construction, and operations. Victor dealt with all the musical, visual, and branding duties. For those first months of construction, they slept on the floor of an apartment with no furniture. 

That’s what led to those early years that most people don’t remember that clearly. Remember when Le Baron had KTV rooms upstairs, and a rooftop? Remember when Victor played “I Can’t Feel My Face” five times in a row on the day it came out? Remember when a whole marching band came through the club and played “Sexual Healing” for Cody’s birthday? It was that kind of place. 

What started as a family club became a kind of must-visit place if you were, say, an NBA player (the club hosted a private event for Michael Jordan on a Tuesday), or a rapper’s manager looking for a place to party on a long weekend. Or a fashion designer who wanted a cool spot to throw an afterparty. Big Bang hung out incognito at a table by the DJ booth. CL came through after her Calvin Klein event. Everyone paid. There was no VIP section or celebrity worship. Maybe that’s why they went there in the first place. 

Heron Preston

And the bookings. Le Baron had bookings that music heads and producers came out to see: Kavinsky, Cashmere Cat, Benji B, Talib Kweli, Cassius, Grandmaster Flash, Jacques Renault, DJ Clark Kent, Jazzy Jeff, Holy Ghost, VERBAL, Breakbot, and Just Blaze, just to name a few. These were names you might find at places like Hong Kong or Singapore, but suddenly they were in Shanghai, in this club with low ceilings and wood floors sometimes sticky with champagne. Le Baron made its own lane. 

Pharrell Williams

Over these next few years, everything changed. Museum and gallery openings became major affairs. KOLs and wanghongs became an industry. Hip hop went mainstream – like, soda commercials on prime-time television mainstream. A whole generation of local designers rose to the international level. I’m not saying Le Baron was the reason for all of this, but when all these characters wanted a place to drink after hustling in their respective lanes, they ended up here. When they needed the afterparty spot, they ended up here. 

VERBAL

And as these scenes elevated, Le Baron elevated together with them. 

Looking back, the turning point was clearly 2017. The Rap of China aired that year. And that’s when Higher Brothers dropped “Made In China”. You could tell right from the hook, this was about to be a massive track. But who could have predicted just how big hip hop was going to go in China? A few weeks after that song, Higher Brothers performed at Le Baron during the week of YoHood – their first club show in Shanghai. Those weeks probably inspired thousands of kids to become rappers. 

Higher Brothers

In the early days, Baron was a smaller scene of in-the-know heads: industry people, fixers, DJs, brand people, agency people, and others who low-key made things happen behind the scenes. But when hip hop and youth culture exploded in 2017, this core suddenly became far more influential and helped drive the city’s culture forward on a much bigger level: offline via conventions, art fairs, festivals, and pop-ups, and online via KOLing and then-new platforms like Douyin. 

KnowKnow

All of this energy fed back into Le Baron. 

That meant more afterparties, now for events like ART021 and new streetwear conventions like Innersect. Longer lines. More bad reviews on Dianping, usually complaining about the door policy. More bottles. More brand collaborations, including Le Baron popping up at Art Basel HK for several years. Surprise guests like Heron Preston came through to play DJ sets. Celebrities passed by nearly every night, and still paid their own way. That KTV upstairs transformed into a cocktail bar called Beverly. Sebastian Tellier played a live set for the opening. Everything happened so fast. 

Klaus Biesenbach. Adrian Cheng

The new stars of hip hop, many of whom had been grinding in the underground for years, suddenly became major celebrities. They wanted a place to party that they could relate to. Le Baron was that place. It wasn’t just rappers, but also the designers and other folks behind brands like Randomevent and DOE, and publications like Dazed. 

Major changes were happening outside of 20 Donghu Lu too. Tests and checks changed the vibe everywhere in 2017. And lots of clubs straight-up closed around this time. Yongfu Lu, Yongkang Lu, and the streets around Hengshan Lu became much quieter. And that meant a lot more drunk people rolled over to Donghu Lu, which people also said was imminently closing. Elsewhere, red clubs with low ceilings started popping up all over China, from Chengdu to Guangzhou. The DJs previously playing at LB started touring all over the country for shows. 

Some lamented the old days of the club. “Le Baron isn’t the same anymore”, they said. It wasn’t. But you gotta change a bit with the years. The tough part is keeping your soul intact. 

As you can imagine, all these factors did shift the vibe at Le Baron. This new energy, money, and clout didn’t exactly line up with the family club ethos of the club, and the new kids were definitely not trying to hear disco all night. But the team stayed mostly the same. Day-ones still filled most of the core positions. Crews and DJs like Wordy, Yeti, Tsunano, and SHFT kept running their nights. The familial vibe remained surprisingly intact as the club’s base became wealthier, more local, and more famous. One night, Pharrell came through and was the last one to leave. He took the stairs became his crew wouldn’t all fit in the elevator and he didn’t wanna split up. Just another surreal night at 20 Donghu Lu. 

Every era has its club, and for the era of hip hop blowing up in China, Le Baron was definitely that club. 

Jay Park

NICKTHEREAL

The next era is much easier to define. 

Le Baron had always closed for Chinese New Year, but they decided to stay open in 2020. Well, until January 23 anyway. That’s the night when every public venue in Shanghai received an order to close, due to a mysterious virus that had been infecting people in Wuhan. 

Nearly three months elapsed. Everyone seemingly got better at cooking, or started making beats, or took up balcony gardening or other passions. Many friends left and still haven’t returned. 

Le Baron remained closed until April 16, 2020 – two or three weeks later than most clubs. The vibe upon return was triumphant and hopeful. Everyone was screaming “Happy New Year!” in April. 

From that night on, for the rest of 2020, nearly every table was booked more than a month in advance. Table spends were, by any standard, outrageous. Loyal guests and weekend arrivals from across China came through to engage in what some called “revenge” spending. Clearly, after three months of isolation, the kids wanted to reunite with friends and acquaintances they hadn’t seen in months, somewhere they felt safe and connected.  

And now in 2021, everything has changed again. (See the theme here?). And not just with hip hop. Techno and “4/4 music”, once subculture genres, have become mainstream. The impossibility of international travel gave the full stage to crews, artists, and brands from all over China, many of whom came up at Le Baron. By night, the streets feel busier than ever, and the number of clubs in downtown Shanghai has nearly tripled just in the past few months. Many of them share a staggering number of characteristics with Le Baron, but they don’t have the same soul. Ask any DJ who’s played Le Baron, and they’ll tell you that it’s the only club in town – maybe in the world – where you can play Future and Travis Scott AND The Beatles and Jocelyn Brown, and some song that just came out that no one knows yet, and it’s totally cool. In fact, it’s encouraged. 

So here we are in June, and Le Baron – and Le Baron only – have decided to end this chapter. The first WeChat post from Cody lays the reasons out clearly: 

“Recently Victor and I have been talking about how we feel that we've done everything we could possibly hope to do and more with this club, in this space. We are truly grateful for the memories made, and we also feel that it is time to wrap up the show.

It is really as simple as that. All good things come to an end, and for this first chapter of Le Baron in China, this is the end.” 

In nightlife, how you exit is often overlooked. Le Baron closed on June 26, 2021 to yet another version of Shanghai. And up until the very end – following their instincts to straight-up close a perfectly functional club – Le Baron Shanghai did it their way. 

You could try to explain Le Baron with stories, like the time Wong Kar Wai shot a film in the club, and then left the crystal beads he hung from the bar because he thought it looked better that way. Or the time Cody had a cup of Earl Grey tea with A$AP Rocky and his manager in an empty Beverly. But Le Baron is way more than surreal stories. It’s more than people losing their shit to Daft Punk in a cloud of smoke and red lights. It’s hard to define with words, but if you’ve ever been there on a good night, you know the emotions.  

Clubs and spaces come and go. Family is forever. Clubs matter, and the best clubs change lives, scenes, and cities for the better. Le Baron Shanghai was one of those clubs. 

An old friend.

June 2021