Shuwen Yang — BFA Fashion Design 2025

Materiality

Escapade : An Absurd Journey

Escapade: An Absurd Journey investigates the concept of “Absurdity” originated from French philosopher Albert Camus’s essay The Myth of Sisyphus. The idea of absurdism refers to the state when “reality is irrational and meaningless.”. The notion of fantastical transcendence had led me to see the human body beyond traditional classification of age, gender, and race, but rather a transformable structure that can be stretched into living sculptures and imaginative creatures. Fictional characters such as Don Quixote are one of my key inspirations in which he lived a farcical yet extravagant life without succumbing to mundaneness and typicality.

As within this collection, creating garments that are unconventional in material and creative in silhouette pinpoints its unusual nature that differs from conventional and industry standards apparels—an array of Avant-Garde wearables, that builds personas’ for the wearers. Originated from a series of hand-crafts techniques including tufting, embroidery, beading, pleasing and coiling, the material development for this collection stemming from countless layers of motions on crafting yarns, threads, pleats, bonings and bindings. A large portion of the raw material was recycled from fabric scraps and leftover yarns from past projects.

Bio

Shuwen Yang is a multi-media fashion designer whose work investigates the possibilities of hand-craftsmanship through an array of labor-intensive material researches, textile manipulations, and experimental constructions. As a maximalist and colorist, Yang’s works often layered with eclectic materials, vibrant colors and exaggerated shapes. With her fine art experience on painting and ceramics, her fashion works address the tactility of surface and celebrates a painterly vision under the methodology of ‘Narrating with yarns, threads and fabric’. Her speciality includes tufting, pleating, coiling, embroidery, and beading. In terms of silhouette, her construction follows the notion of free sculpturing around the body through spiraling cut, boning insertion and wiring. Inspired by Avant-Garde art movements and Surrealism, her designs reimagines historical artworks into a fantastical, theatrical, and dreamlike reverie that transcends the conventional boundary of gender, class, and race, which in the end— dress for personality only.