Runway shows for major fashion houses can often feature over 100 looks and, quite often while watching them, your mind starts wandering, lost after an accessory, a shiny fabric or a mesmerising pattern. Once the show is over, though, you get the impression you would never be able to point out what you would really like to buy as you feel distracted and confused - was that a jacket, a dress or maybe an accessory or a piece of jewellery? In the end, being slightly lost, you just shrug and get on with your life with the vague impression you have just seen something desirable, but you can't point out anymore what that was. This doesn't happen instead in Yeohlee Teng's collections as they are usually compact and aimed at real women.
One of the very first designers who around the '80s started creating architectural garments in a coherent way, Teng recently presented her Resort collection.
Featuring as usual a limited amount of designs, it immediately allowed you to spot what is really missing in your wardrobe. Teng's main inspiration for this collection was the weather that has become rather unpredictable, a symptom of climate change.
Teng included in the collection a series of lightweight rain jackets of the kind you may want to wear even when it is actually not raining as their translucent texture made them look practical and versatile.
Among the outerwear there were a beige jacket and a white waxed-linen coat: the former looked like paper, while the pattern of the latter hid a secret. This jacket can indeed be transformed into a skirt thanks to strategically placed seams that reshape the sleeves into the folds of a skirt.
In this way if the wearer gets her trousers wet while walking in the rain, she can remove them and transform the jacket into a skirt, and, while this exercise in transformative fashion may not be that necessary (most of us after all usually keep on wearing their wet trousers until they get home...), it proves that real originality lies in pattern knowledge and hides in mathematical precision.
Teng is a bit of a math obsessed designer as she makes sure that her clothes are so well-cut to avoid any waste - that's also why leftovers from Teng's Morse code printed garments (this effect was one of the few prints featured in this collection together with a torn wallpaper motif in yellow) were employed to make the straps of a long black dress.
Another Resort piece worth mentioning is a black zero waste one size fits all jacket (matched with a nude coloured rain vest) with a detachable flat hood that can be used as a headscarf or can simply lie flat on the shoulders, its origami-like flatness and monastic silhouette eliminating bulky hoods that usually end up breaking a simple and elegant silhouette. Talking about headgear and saving fabrics, the puffy sleeve silhouette of one top was also based on one of Teng's zero waste hats.
The focus on the tailoring gave the pieces a refined touch, proving that the added values in Teng's designs keep on being exact proportions and pattern cutting precision, resulting in zero waste. There's actually also another added value: the designer states that many of these creations are unisex and, in an industry that mainly uses the genderless label with great fanfare but mainly for marketing reasons, Yeohlee Teng's humble neutrality is to be welcomed.
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