Espiegle, Making Process

ESPIEGLE

A variety of strange shapes and colourful, innovative materials can be seen throughout Xin Wen’s series of works. She incorporates different cuttings and colours that have a diverse chemical effect to enhance the wearer’s character.

She is inspired by fairytales, nature and life and uses a range of different techniques such as silkscreen printing, laser cutting and embroidery to create her designs.

Each piece of work is handmade, allowing them to be completely unique.

The idea for her S/S14 embroidery mushroom hat series, ‘The Snooker’s Gift’ came from a book about mushrooms, which she found very enchanting. It’s a fairytale that tells a story about a wizard who likes to send gifts to everyone at midnight. Her favourite item to send is her own special mushrooms, so it was from there that Xin started to create hats around this story.

With the mushroom hat, Xin first did the screen-printing and then the embroidery. Moving on, to shape the whole hat she needed to make a small model first, then used that as a guide to laser cut the wood to model the final version. The whole process is completely handmade, that particularly one took nearly three weeks to complete..

The inspiration for her S/S15 Fruit Series came from from studying in the UK. She learnt a range of new techniques and wanted to try them out. Xin created all the shapes and colours for this series. The shape of the headdress was made from a mould of fruit and everything was hand sewn. In order to enhance the headdress and make it more fun she chose her own colours and then dyed them herself so each fruit is a different shade.