Yen Wong, design process

Yen Wong’s graduate collection, Sunny Side Up! centers around the perfect 1950s-60s woman and the immense social pressures placed upon her to constantly project perfection. This eventually leads to an eventual manic episode, where perfection and panic is distorted. The collection heavily references classic couture and tailoring silhouettes as well as construction techniques from that time period, playing with exaggerated silhouettes and voluminosity.

The collection distorts 1950s couture and tailoring and takes a comical approach to design, embracing the fragile psyche of the perfect woman as a camp caricature of herself. Yen’s approach to pattern cutting involves exaggerating shoulder and hip silhouettes, reinterpreting Dior’s iconic New Look with a skewed perspective. Additionally, she plays with voluminosity, using traditional couture techniques to achieve high levels of volume.

There is a strong emphasis on material and textile in the collection, exploring the idea of “cheap luxury” and hand-weaving tweed using unlikely, synthetic and quite disposable materials such as scoubidou bracelets, Christmas decor and polypropylene bags and displacing them alongside actual luxury fabrics such as Melton wool. Yen also takes heritage and culture into consideration, drawing inspiration from her Malaysia-Chinese background to develop prints for her collection.