Wang He Yi, design process

WANG HE YI - W. H. Y’s graduate collection ‘The Waste Land’ draws inspirations from a dramatic scene in the British avant-garde movie A Clockwork Orange (1971) - a cat lady doing yoga before a murder falling upon her. The tension and message of this scene were chosen for elaborating the dialectical emphasis in both ancient Chinese Taoist philosophy and western modern avant-garde aesthetics. The discovery of the Aesthetics of Ugliness is a rebellion of beauty-centred conventional ideology, which opens a whole new world to our human beings.

The development of design is a fabric-oriented process. Determined by the chosen scene, the grassy ceiling and the bloody carpet became the colour indication of the textiles for this collection. Fabrics were narrowed down to a green grassy cotton velvet, a vibrant red synthetic satin. To smoothly merge the two contrast tones together, gold and peach coloured fabrics were chosen to form the collection together. For the main fabrics, they were treated with destructive manipulations. To explain, the green cotton velvet was embellished by the embellisher (a needle punching machine) to generate its rippling effect, and the red satin was burnt by heat a gun to achieve its crunchy effect. The idea behind the manipulation is that transfer beautiful things into ‘ugly things’ and vice versa through the destructive process, thus approving the interchangeable.

Based on the fabrics chosen, the designs are developed according to the dramatic scene. The fabric-oriented process also facilitates the brand to source biodegradable materials that don’t pose threats to our darling environment. As the ancient Chinese philosophy Taoism promoted in 2000 years ago - human beings need to live harmoniously with nature - a primitive sustainable idea.