Yiqing Yin Fall Winter 2012

Known for her feather-light creations where pleats and ruffles are rife and seem to float in space, Yiqing Yin‘s goal as a designer is to create garments that protect and reinforce whilst functioning like a second skin.

Emigrating from China at the age of four and moving around several countries meant Yin turned to clothes as her point of reference. Her website quotes her as saying; ”Returning to my clothes was like living once more within my body and my emotions; I was at home.”

“Examining the dynamic potential of pleats, she imagines structures which are never fixed, shapes that are always in mutation. She sculpts the emptiness around the body with, as a common thread, the search for balance and points of rupture between the flowing zones and the sculpted zones. The modernisation of smocking and the elimination of any order of construction allows her great room for experimentation. She models loose shapes with a staggering structure, whilst at the same time remaining within the limits of patterned designs, confessing her attraction for a method of creation which is intuitive, a sensory wandering, and the search for voluntary accidents.”

Elected by the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture into the Haute Couture calendar in 2011, Yin’s garments are hauntingly beautiful. With their modern, armour-like appearance and near impossible construction I am left wowed by her designs. In this, her Spring of Nuwa collection, each piece re-imagines the female form in a world of purely mineral and vegetable composition. Politanoff wrote in the Huffington Post: “Light cascades of satin and muslin offer oblique suggestions of chasteness through their mounting layers. Skin is laid bare beneath pink-besprinkled tulle. Red remains pure. Silver and blue fade into one.”

To watch Yin’s collections unfold is to witness a metamorphosis in action. View more of Yin’s designs on her website.