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Artist Info
Yeohlee
“Clothes have magic. Their geometry forms shapes that can lend a wearer power.” These words have been Yeohlee’s mission statement throughout her thirty year career. She is a modernist whose clean-lined, functional clothing is the result of combining a honed, mathematical approach to design with an economical use of materials. Urban and urbane, the Yeohlee aesthetic eschews frivolous ornament and instead relies on innovative geometric cuts to give her garments shape and form. Many have described her work as architectural.
It is not surprising, therefore, that architecture has long been a source of inspiration for Yeohlee. She was born Yeohlee Teng to a family of architects in Malaysia. Neighbors noted that if one were to throw a stone over the fence into the Teng courtyard, it would hit an architect. Rather than take up that discipline, however, Yeohlee moved to New York and studied fashion at Parson’s School of Design. Fittingly, just a couple of years after she debuted her eponymous line, Yeohlee was one of the featured designers in a seminal 1982 exhibition at MIT entitled “Intimate Architecture: Contemporary Clothing Design.” Organizing curator Dr. Susan Sidlauskus noted that Yeohlee’s work “derives from a persistent tug between the stasis of precise planes and the sweep of movement. Her forms have a studied dignity that is almost ecclesiastical. Poles of movement and stillness, light and dark, depth and surface are plotted out in meticulously articulate forms.”
Yeohlee’s judicious use of raw materials and her strong focus on function have proven to be prescient. As early as the 1980s, far ahead of the green movement in fashion, Yeohlee hand-cut a single garment from a three-yard swath of fabric, and had no leftover pieces. This is a remarkable feat in a design field long known for its wastefulness. Commitment to such carful conservation of materials has led to the development of one of Yeohlee’s most important concepts, that of “zero waste.”
She is a firm believer in clothing that fits the needs of contemporary life. While many other designers also speak in support of that belief, few of them make functional design a central focus of their work. Yeohlee is an advocate of clothing that shelters, that is understated in order to be “proper” in nearly all occassions, and that can move with its wearer in nearly all situations. Yeohlee’s vision earned her work the moniker “supermodern” and her clients the title “urban nomads.”
