This project started with the word ‘Home’, she tried to define the different meaning of what home make her feel, and make more in depth with her personal idea for the inspiration that Yixin wants to make ‘Home’ more in a personal way with the idea ‘anti social’. She wanted to use ‘Unmasked’ as the main concept for the project, it perfectly combines the ideas about how she defines her home - provides a safe place where we can get safety and rest from and also no need to social out ‘mask’. In this way, she found the direction of her inspiration.

For the beginning of her primary research she started with the outside sky around her home to find the elements make her feel relax, so she collected lots of ombre sky photo and draw them into first colour palette. From this process she almost has an idea about the colour feeling for the print as the background colour.

In London Aquarium sea life she found that the marine animal they usually hide themselves inside corals - treating them as home. And the textures and colours of their skins are also like shelter for them to blend so well into the environment where they need to protect themselves, his point is perfectly same with the idea of mask - you choose to put on the mask because you need to ‘fit’. The situation could be different for human and animal, they need mask for living and human need ‘mask’ for living as well - in a social way.

As the style of projects always inspired Yixin from the animal to get the texture, after lots of primary research she started to draw from the sea slug and sea snake as the print textures.

She always intended to do more experimentation about the way how print can show the colours and textures in different ways, so she used different fabric skills to present the texture of her drawing and chose the best fabric for the final selection.

And because of the Covid-19 pandemic situation she can only process her print digitally and layer them all up on the mannequin, Yixin made the prints follow the nature mirrored effect from sea slug skin to have the very first silhouette for her garments, and also as a print designer she wanted to keep the body lines as soft and natural as they can to maintain the ‘home’ relax feeling and concept.

Also because of the special situation we had this year, she tried to develop the crystal embellishment part also into a digital way which also kept the less using of the material than it need before and also provided a thought of how we can make less waste about the material we use in the industry and material which can be re-used and recycled.