A unique vision
It's impossible to talk about Yiqing Yin simply as a designer. Even more than fashion, she's passionate about materials. She doesn't work behind her drawing board, a multitude of colored pencils in front of her, ready to imagine her collections and put them down on paper. Why is this? Because her work is instinctive and imagined directly on the material? Her clothing is conceived as armor, a second skin that protects and strengthens. Yiqing Yin works with his hands. A rectangle of fabric, how it moves, falls, rolls up. The shapes will take shape on their own, finding their balance between tension and blur, the better to draw the emptiness around the body. It's easy to see why Yiqing Yin fancied herself a sculptor.
Yiqing Yin, a woman with an atypical background
Born in China, Yiqing Yin left her homeland at an early age for Australia, then France, where she studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. She quickly won recognition from the profession, which saw in her the future of couture: Grand Prix de la Création de la Ville de Paris, publication in Vogue, exhibition at Galerie Joyce. Then the ANDAM prize in 2011 for her first collection. She joins the official haute couture calendar as a Membre Invité in January 2012, with Guerlain, Cartier and Lancôme commissioning her designs for advertisements. Audrey Tautou will wear one of her dresses at the Opening Ceremony of the 64th Cannes Film Festival.
Today, she is in charge of breathing new life into the House of Léonard, bringing her energy and her work with materials for a new nomadic, modern woman, without abandoning her own couture and ready-to-wear collections, which she sees as a synthesis of her brand.
Constantly experimenting
For the past 3 years, his house has been shaking up the codes of couture and blowing a new wind. An experimentation in clothing inspired by the architecture of the human body, the world of nature and its metamorphosis. Nothing is set in stone, but rather deconstructed, torn apart. Start with the material, let movement invade it, mix it, be it natural or technological. For the Summer 2015 collection, she worked with Jacquard techniques, using images of lichen and faded walls, as well as embroidery blending silk and Lurex, against a backdrop of origami techniques underscoring her attachment to organic architecture. The structure of the garment is never static, volumes seemingly in mutation, in perpetual motion for a woman filled with a certain paradox, between sensuality and violence, dream and rigor, who wears the garment like soft armor.
Yiqing Yin creates an exciting universe that restores the sometimes lost beauty of fashion. Her creations bring grace and strength through taut lines reminiscent of architecture and an undeniable poetry of movement. His experimental, almost anarchic work is wonderfully unpredictable.
Photo credits: ©poiret
