About Me
Hi, l'm Chenwei, a fashion graduate from Edinburgh College of Art.
With specialism in womenswear, my designs tend to encourage people to style them with creativity, to challenge the conventional principles of wearing clothing, and in the end, people's engagement would again become part of my design intentions.
I have a deep reflection on the relationship between fashion and our surroundings, and l believe we can use our fashion power to make a change. My graduate collection has a focus on constraint and deconstruction. l was trying to demonstrate the energy floating in between the living space, for example, how it reacts to residents, and how it delivers positive and negative emotion to people, then l connected this conception with the relationship between clothing and human body. The art of binding and wrapping goes well with the dislocation of panels, and the beauty of volume.
INSPIRATION
It's about a deep exploration into Hong Kong's social problems alongwith core Japanese aesthetics.
Starting from Hong Kong cage home and the suffocating city landscape, l began to explore the bondage of physical space for human beings, then to the emotional entanglement between clothing and flesh: wrapped and entangled, stretched and unstructured. At the same time, this chaos made me think: what if we don't have enough space to store our clothes? So in each of my designs, I combined different types of clothing together to express the idea of stacking clothes in a small space.
The simple lines, the flow of space within Japanese traditional interiors and the concept of the cage house neutralise with each other. Following with this, l would like to free the limitation of dressing principles based on deconstructivism —— a main characteristics appearing in Japnese fashion designs. Finally, both myself and my sources of inspiration are deeply rooted in East Asian culture and I have chosen the very iconic calligraphy as the element that links the collection together.
MY WORK
PORTFOLIOS
Concept
Research
Research
Caligraphy Letter Development
Design Development
Design Development/Fitting
Design Development/Fitting
Fabric/Color Development
Line-up
Illustrations
Illustration1
Illustration2
Lookbook1
Lookbook2
DETAIL
Chinese Caligraphy Letters
As a crossover point between my two main design themes (Hong Kong cage home and Japanese core design aesthetics), (Chinese) calligraphy is something that l grew up with, which is deeply rooted in my East-Asian gene. Taking inspiration from traditional Chinese poems, l chose topics related with life and death, which is also part of the Zen spirit. l used acrylic materials and had them laser cut as individual letters, holes were added in between the strokes in order to consistently connect them by jump rings. They appear in my collection in different ways: some of the individuals are acting as connection units among panels; some of them play as fringes under the shorts; some of them go like an outside vest onto the top and then l will have more engraved ones plus recycling leftover cut-outs to further finalize the collection. These accessory-feeling objects help to reinforce my concept, and the collection now has the power to speak for itself.
“I think perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion.” -- Yohji Yamamoto
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