Yuzi Zhang, design process

Yuzi Zhang’s shirt project during the study of Menswear in London College of Fashion is about Masculinity. It is more like a personal taste of men. ‘Strong’ and ‘tough’ are words that are normally used to describe men, but boys do cry, the softness and tenderness deeply inside of a man’s hard shell, those feminine figures are what she is attracted by. The project is about taking off men’s professional suit that the society ask them to, looking at the soft little boy that invisible for the outsiders.

The project is more about abstract feelings, she made a small installation that illustrate the process of opening a man’s heart and discovering the soft inner world of him. This is her way to turn abstract feelings into some visual concert things, that could be used for further development into garment.

She used a shirt to imitate the shape that she extract from the installation. In this way, she transforms her abstract feelings to the fabric on the mannequin. There are lots of interesting details in those 3D work, it is a playful process. She also made many fabric modification samples with gauze and other soft, flowing fabric to help build up the collection.

Following are some process that how she uses the details in those 3D work to develop them into garments. She copy the outline of the shape with transparent paper and put them on a model to see how to turn it into a real garment. Then choose several doodles to add details on and further develop for the final collection. There are lots of strong garments coming out in this process.

Here is her illustration of the final line-up. Colours are inspired by a song of her favourite band- Sweet by Cigarette after sex. Due to the pandemic, she couldn’t get any fabric samples for this collection, but from the illustration, it is clear that she mainly uses yarn and gauze, those kind of soft fabric to give the garments feeling of flowing. The white shirt on the left is the one that she choose to made.