Originally revealed to the public with her dress worn by Audrey Tautou at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, the designer Yiqing Yin once again amazed us with her Autumn/Winter 2016 Haute Couture collection. An abundance of lace (Sophie Hallette, of course) interpreted in a sometimes fresh and ethereal, sometimes somber and urban manner …
How is lace modern? And what does it bring to a woman’s elegance today ?
Lace has a timeless dimension. Since it is so delicate, it plays with the senses and with the skin, revealing it with an erotic modesty. For day or evening, it offers an irresistible touch of sensuality, seduction, even provocation, to make a woman elegant.
Your first, or most beautiful memory of lace…
The pearly laces in the Shalimar dress worn by Natalia (Vodianova, heroine of the advertising film for Guerlain’s perfume). Cut out and recomposed like minerals, they seem alive, as if they have been sprayed with water, gold and light to literally grow on her skin in front of the Taj Mahal.
How do your creative ideas develop in relation to lace ? Does seeing a specific lace inspire a garment for you ? Or the opposite, is it the idea of a garment that guides you to a specific lace ?
I always begin by discovering the material. A lace’s composition could inspire a story. For this collection, I had a visual shock when I found laces that had “released”, unstructured, abstract designs with great finesse, that resembled part-human, part-reptile second skins. I wanted to construct a sensory story based on the phenomenon of moulting by using lace and the graphic patterns of snakeskin. The laces I selected were embroidered from above to look like moulting. The fusion of the two graphic bodies also inspired a print, a crocheted embroidery and a burned-out organza motif.
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Credit portrait photo to : James Bort
