Winning the 2012 edition of the "Feel the Yarn" competition brought luck to fashion designer Xiao Li. A couple of weeks ago, Li won indeed the Diesel Award at the Trieste-based ITS competition, confirming her talent, but also the importance of smaller and less advertised awards for students.
Organised in Florence during the July edition of the Pitti Filati fair and currently in its fourth year, "Feel the Yarn" focuses on creativity, training and quality, matching young knitwear designers selected from international schools and colleges with Italian yarn manufacturers and inviting them to create innovative pieces revolving around a special theme.
For this year's event students were asked to design two or three knitted pieces inspired by the "Pull-Lovers" theme and exploring the body and its mutations through voluminous, sculptural or three-dimensional pieces.
There were many fashion institutions involved from Europe to Asia - the Royal College of Art and Kingston University; the Hochschule Niederrehein University of Applied Sciences; the Accademia di Costume e di Moda and Naba; The Hong Kong Polythechnic Uniersity - Institute of Textiles and Clothing, the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology - BIFT and Bunka Fashion College.
The winner, 23-year-old Yiyi Guo, is a post-graduate student from BIFT who majored in fashion design and who will graduate in 2014. Guo injected in her designs all her passion for combinations of bright colours.
At times the three designs she presented looked a bit like costumes for modern super-heroines, but her main inspiration actually came from something much more human, the minute differences in eye colour. The blurred knitwear patterns, pleated motifs opening up to reveal further shades or three-dimensional eye-shaped effects decorating her dresses and accessories should therefore be interpreted as studies about the eye and the presence of the pigment melanin in cells called melanocytes which are present in the stroma of the iris, or references to pigmentation disorders like heterochromia iridis.
Did you enjoy Florence and the "Feel the Yarn" competition?
Yiyi Guo: I love Florence, it's a romantic city full of history and love, and it was the perfect place for the main theme of the 2013 edition of Feel The Yarn - "Pull Lover". I didn't expect to win the competition as I was surrounded by very talented participants, so the award came as a complete surprise to me.
Can you tell us more about the themes and inspirations for the three designs you did for Feel the Yarn?
Yiyi Guo: I moved from the "eye" theme, interpreting the eyes as the windows of our hearts. We can not only feel love through a lover’s eyes but also transmit our love to somebody else just by looking at them. I love colour very much and we all have differently coloured eyes, so I employed a variety of shades - yellow, blue, red, pink, purple, green and so on - and materials such as yarn, shells and metal rivets, and mixed them together to obtain a combination of 2D and 3D effects and evoke in this way the different shapes of the human eye while hinting at the same time at our colourful souls.
Which techniques did you employ in your knitwear?
Yiyi Guo: I used various techniques: dying, galling, hand-knitting, sesame jacquard, digital printing, coating and felting.
What kind of yarns did you use for your designs and which Italian yarn company were you paired with?
Yiyi Guo: My sponsor was New Mill. Most of the yarn I've used to make the three garments were 100% wool, and the rest were blends of wool and other fibres. New Mill is a huge yarn company and the collaboration was easy going. The difficult part was maybe in the choice of colours as I wanted to mix lots of different shades together to obtain quite complex effects, so, if a specific colour wasn't available, I requested white yarn and then dyed it.
What fascinates you about knitwear?
Yiyi Guo: I think it's a form of art closely linked to our life since it is an old craft. Even my grandma's grandma knew how to knit, but we as young designers can put our innovative ideas and techniques into a traditional craft and produce fashionable and comfortable pieces.
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