Beige sheer bra and panty set with black ribbon trim

Jean Yu

BiographyJean Yu is an anomaly in the American annals of ready-to-wear design, as well as in the international realm contemporary fashion marketing. This New York-based designer does not create seasonal, runway collections, and she has carved out a career and a following in the narrowest of fashion niches— exquisite, hand-crafted lingerie. Yet fashion insiders covet her work. Universally lauded for her refined taste and maniacal attention to detail, Yu irreverently describes her Restraint bras and Captive panties as “vulgar.” Clearly, She does not mean that her work is either commonplace or lacking in taste, but rather that she likes the lingerie she designs to have an edge that is perhaps slightly indecent—maybe even a little obscene.

Yu was born in South Korea, and her family immigrated to Los Angeles when she was still a child. She began her career in the 1990s as a designer of jeans, then began to focus on lingerie in 2004. Since then, Yu has designed more than just bespoke undergarments. Today, she produces a line of robes and has embarked on a lesser-priced line of separates being produced in India, called Jean Yu 180.

However, the most spectacular works in the Yu oeuvre are her evening dresses and daywear. Like the great couturiers she reveres, such as Madeline Vionnet, Yu uses clothing construction as a primary point of departure. Each of her creations is a blend of traditional hand-workmanship (she drapes each of her own unique designs), rigorous aesthetics (clean modernism in the vein of modernist architects like Robert Mallet Stevens) and either breathtaking bareness or overt focus on specific areas of the body, such as the bottom (culled from her specialization as maker of exquisite lingerie). The finished creations are pale silk gowns, punctuated with black geometric insets and suspended from a harness of black grosgrain ribbon, and suits cut from geometric shapes and molded into soft pyramids and cones—marvels of mobile engineering that beautifully caress the female form.

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