Golden A' Design Award Winner 2023
This remarkable garment, created by designer Yi Yin and recipient of the prestigious Golden A' Design Award in Fashion, Apparel and Garment Design, represents a compelling synthesis of traditional textile heritage and contemporary sculptural ambition that pushes the boundaries of what garments might achieve as expressive vehicles. The work demonstrates exceptional technical accomplishment in its structural engineering, where rigid armature elements maintain dramatic extended forms while remaining integrated with the body's architecture, suggesting sophisticated pattern-making and construction methodologies that balance wearability with theatrical presence. The designer appears to engage thoughtfully with cultural textile traditions, incorporating what seem to be resist-dyed fabrics bearing pattern vocabularies associated with indigo craft heritage, while recontextualizing these materials within a decidedly contemporary formal language characterized by angular geometry and architectural extension. The chromatic decision to work predominantly within the blue spectrum creates visual coherence while allowing for rich tonal variation, the deep navy passages grounding the composition while lighter cerulean and patterned sections introduce visual rhythm and textural interest. Particularly noteworthy is the lower panel's incorporation of fluid, wave-like cutwork patterns that introduce organic movement into the otherwise angular composition, suggesting perhaps references to natural phenomena or traditional decorative motifs reimagined through contemporary fabrication technologies. The work invites consideration of fashion's capacity to transform the human silhouette into something simultaneously recognizable and radically reimagined, the figure becoming a armature for artistic expression that extends beyond mere covering or adornment. Viewers might contemplate how this garment negotiates between tradition and innovation, between the intimate scale of clothing and the monumental ambition of sculpture, between cultural heritage and global contemporary design discourse, and how such negotiations produce objects of remarkable visual and conceptual richness.
Blue Ants was inspired by the famous historical event in China, the Cultural Revolution. During this decade, people regardless of gender and age spontaneously wore uniform blue overalls, so they were called blue ants by people in other countries. In terms of materials, this project mainly focuses on fashion and textile design using old clothes transformation, cyanotype photography, and laser cutting, striving to design clothing that is both environmentally friendly and fashionable.