Surrealist Fashion
28 July 2010
Yang Du is definitely a surrealist. And before being a fashion designer, she is a painter. So Yang is a surrealist painter. With a passion for photography. Her fashion work is often inspired by trips she did. She travelled to Egypt, India, Hungary, Ecuador…The pictures she takes during these trips are inspiration material for her paintings, and the paintings then become inspiration material for her fashion. It’s like an in-depth elaboration of what her eyes see and her mind thinks during these trips. Colours and atmospheres and people and places get clearer and clearer in Yang’s mind until they are ready to be translated in clothes.
Yang Du graduated from Louise Wilson’s MA Course at Central Saint Martins College. So no doubt she had the qualities to be selected as a fashion finalist for ITS#SEVEN. The collection she presented was inspired by a trip to Egypt, resulting in a combination of exhuberant colours and rich textures, with a bright colour palette and the use of fake fur and knitting. A relaxed and very fun collection, with very subtle sexy element. But we had met Yang a couple years before that…
It was in March 2007 and we were travelling for our scouting tour in the schools. We always stop in London and we always spend at least one day at Central Saint Martins to meet the students. Yang was finishing her BA at the time and the first thing that caught our attention was her humbleness, her smile, the enthusiasm she put in explaining her work and the love she had for Moschino. There is in fact a lot of the fun and the playfulness of Moschino in her work.
We met her again one year later and she was finishing her MA course with professor Louise Wilson, who declared - it’s one of Yang’s favourite compliments - she had not seen such an original work in a long time. Her work had gone through an amazing improvement and the concept, which we illustrated above, was so appealing she literally sticked to our minds and we brought her project to the ITS#SEVEN preselections convinced she would make it to the finals. Which she did….
We have remained in touch with Yang ever since. She always keeps us updated on what she is doing, on the trips she is making for inspiration…Not just a wonderful designer, a wonderful person. We are so lucky to attract quite a number of these and we guess this is one of the best aspects of ITS…
Yang Du has been very busy after her participation at ITS. Work experiences at Vivienne Westwood, Galliano and Giles Deacon made her stronger and ready to become independent and work on her own stuff, establishing her own line and presenting her collections during London and Paris fashion weeks in the context of the OnIOff Showrooms, with good results with buyers and good feedback from the press. In China for instance she did a shooting for Vogue and was called to Beijing to present her work and give a lecture and the Tsinghua University (we receive a lot of projects every year from this far away school!).
After “Falling in Love is a Risk”, the collection she presented at ITS#SEVEN, Yang was able to present a new collection each season. That’s really hard to achieve with the crazy fast-paced rhythm the fashion world has. Conceiving new work every six months - without being a multi-millionaire, hundred-designers brad - can be really stressful! The following collection “Buda and Pest” was inspired by a trip to Hungary and again mixed knitwear with fabulous prints, turning clothes into pieces of art, canvasses for Yang’s powerful and colourful illustration to express completely.
It was then the turn of “Mr Right Town”, with silhouettes following the body, some short dresses but with explosions of colour and playfulness (along with a hint of sexiness) intact, a signature in Yang’s designs. What’s new in this one is that there’s no prints at all, everything is patchworked! And there’s even more space for accessories, with two wonderful “tiger” and “lemur” (not entirely sure about this one, it looks like one…) backpacks made in knitwear and leather.
The last collection Yang has presented is called “My Heart” and it’s again a mixed women/ men collection we warmly recommend you have a look at on her website www.yangdu-duyang.com. It was presented at On I Off during the last London Fashion Week, supporting an organisation to end child poverty in the world, through a fund raising from the outfits sale.
Yang has also seen her clothes borrowed by Lady Gaga (quite a number of ITS finalists have been doing clothes for her lately) both for a Japanese TV feature and a music video…A first step that might take her to see her clothes worn by her style icons Bjork (that would make so much sense in our opinion), Grace Jones and Lily Cole. We think there’s absolutely no reason why this shouldn’t happen. Yang Du is art first and foremost, translated into fashion. Her work is out of trends, and that’s what makes it timeless.
