{"id":707,"date":"2018-10-24T15:37:19","date_gmt":"2018-10-24T15:37:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging.fashionweekstoretours.com\/?p=707"},"modified":"2018-10-24T15:37:19","modified_gmt":"2018-10-24T15:37:19","slug":"yeohlee-teng-an-american-designer-clothes-have-magic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.fashionweekstoretours.com\/?p=707","title":{"rendered":"Yeohlee Teng: An American Designer\u2014\u201cClothes have Magic\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yeohlee Teng, the Founder of YEOHLEE Inc., describes in this interview with Dan Hodges what makes the clothes she designs magical. Yeohlee is originally from\u00a0Malaysia\u00a0and is of Malaysian-Chinese heritage. She studied at Parsons\u00a0School of Design, The\u00a0New\u00a0School\u00a0and is based in\u00a0New York City. Yeohlee established her own house, YEOHLEE Inc.<\/a>,\u00a0in 1981.\u00a0Yeohlee is the recipient of the Smithsonian\u2019s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Fashion.\u00a0Yeohlee\u2019s work and designs are part of the permanent collection of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the late Richard Martin, then Chief Curator, called her \u201cone of the most ingenious makers of clothing today.\u201d She dresses the \u201curban nomad,\u201d a term she coined in her Fall 1997 collection, defining a lifestyle that requires clothing that works on a variety of practical and psychological levels. She is a master of design management and believes in the efficiency of year-round, \u201cseasonless\u201d clothes.<\/p>\n

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Standing tall: Fashion designer Yeohlee Teng. Photo by Sophie Elgort<\/h6>\n

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Question: When did your journey into the world of design begin?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cMy brothers and their friends were all architects. We had this big sketch book in our house that everybody drew in, so I grew up drawing. I was the school artist and designed\u00a0all the costumes for our school plays and painted the murals there. I remember working on a mural with my best friend that was the length of the basketball court\u2014my first lesson in scale.\u201d<\/p>\n

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If you go back to the times of Cleopatra or the ancient Greeks and Romans, clothing was always making a statement.\u00a0In your book you say that \u201cclothes have magic\u201d\u2014what do you mean by that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe complete quote was \u2018Clothes have magic. Their geometry forms shapes that can lend a wearer power\u2019 (Hayden Gallery, MIT, 1982, from the exhibition catalogue Intimate Architecture: Contemporary Clothing Design.)
\nGoing back in time, robes and voluminous headdresses were always profoundly understood by tribal chiefs as well as the Catholic Church to be powerful. I am aware of how much authority can be communicated through what\u00a0one chooses to wear. The same quote that I gave at MIT in 1982 is in my book,\u00a0YEOHLEE: WORK 2003. The exhibition, Intimate Architecture: Contemporary Clothing Design held at MIT\u2019s Hayden Gallery was a pivotal show that put women\u2019s fashion\/clothing into the context of the design world. Up until then it was women\u2019s fashion in magazines and in store windows, but this was a serious exhibition and it was about clothing as armor. We were not trying to elevate our discipline by reference. Intimate Architecture was about a tortoise in its shell. It\u2019s not about the built environment that architects create. We create intimate architecture because it\u2019s the first shelter that you build around yourself.<\/p>\n

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\nSilhouettes of Yeohlee\u2019s work, seen in the exhibition\u00a0\u201cFashion: Yeohlee Teng\u201d at\u00a0PS 1 in 1984.
\nImage credit: Yeohlee, photo by Yeohlee Teng<\/h6>\n

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What examples do you have that validate your \u201cclothes have magic\u201d statement?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cA memorable example about clothes having magic happened with a woman who bought a coat of mine at Saks. At the end of a talk I was giving at Yale, during the Q&A, a woman in the audience stood up and said that at the beginning of her career when she wasn\u2019t making a lot of money there was a coat designed by YEOHLEE that she really wanted. She had an internal debate: \u2018Should I buy the YEOHLEE coat or pay the rent?\u2019 She went back and forth about it for a week, and then she bought the coat. Then a week later, she was walking down the street and this guy came up to her and said \u2018My God, you look beautiful.\u2019 She was certain that her beauty was buoyed by the coat she was wearing and she proudly said \u2018and we are still married today.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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Where do you get your inspiration?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cInspiration can be serendipitous. For instance, I was biking along the East River and stopped by the\u00a0Brooklyn\u00a0Bridge. I was surprised and amazed by the multitude of jellyfish swarming in the water. Presto\u2014Spring 2009\u2014jellyfish floating through Bernard Tschumi\u2019s\u00a0Parc de la Vilette\u00a0grid, creating a buoyant dialogue between the supple and the solid. Inspiration comes from everywhere and everything\u2014the breeze, a song, a whisper or a being.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\nA look from the Yeohlee ready-to-wear spring 2018 collection.
\nImage credit: Yeohlee, photo by\u00a0Kyle Ericksen<\/h6>\n

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How do you stay in touch with the trends that are going on in the marketplace?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI watch and try to listen with an open mind and read as much as I can.\u201d<\/p>\n

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What advice do you have for young designers?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWatch the clock. You don\u2019t have a second to spare. Be driven. Deliver. Be a master of your own time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yeohlee Teng, the Founder of YEOHLEE Inc., describes in this interview with Dan Hodges what makes the clothes she designs magical. Yeohlee is originally from\u00a0Malaysia\u00a0and is of Malaysian-Chinese heritage. She studied at Parsons\u00a0School of Design, The\u00a0New\u00a0School\u00a0and is based in\u00a0New York City. Yeohlee established her own house, YEOHLEE Inc.,\u00a0in 1981.\u00a0Yeohlee is the recipient of the Smithsonian\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":709,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fashionweekstoretours.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fashionweekstoretours.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fashionweekstoretours.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fashionweekstoretours.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fashionweekstoretours.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=707"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fashionweekstoretours.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":711,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fashionweekstoretours.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707\/revisions\/711"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fashionweekstoretours.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fashionweekstoretours.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fashionweekstoretours.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fashionweekstoretours.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}