WOVEN IN: Don’t ask Yiqing Yin for the rationale behind her diaphanous and intricately pleated couture creations.
Her creative process of letting hands guide fabric where it feels natural and leaving room for happenstance will be center stage in “Of Air And Dreams,” a new exhibition at the International City of Lace and Fashion museum in Calais, France. It will open on June 14 and run through Jan. 4, 2026.
“Each design is very intuitive, very instinctive, never over-analyzed and ultimately I had never done this exercise of putting a rationale on my work,” she told WWD.
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To give rhyme and reason to her work, she and the exhibition’s curator Sylvie Marot “chose to use air and smoke as the starting point and throughline [to] attempt to illustrate the logic of something that isn’t logical at all,” the designer said.
It is the first exhibition to center on the designer, whose work has previously been showcased in the likes of the French Ministry of Culture, at the 2013 Venice Biennale in the city’s pavilion and at the French pavilion during the 2020 World Expo in Dubai.
Set in the museum’s 5,920-square-foot temporary exhibition space, a series of tableaux offer some 70 dresses, spanning Yin’s 2009 graduate collection to creations made this year.
Displays will follow a thematic rather than chronological order, alighting on ideas such as the female anatomy, chimeric creatures, marine depths, “all things inspired by moving nature and which transform,” Yin said. Ropes and knots are another theme that embodies connections being made, also a throughline in the exhibit.
They will also involve sketches, photography, prose written by the designer and even scents, developed with perfumer Dominique Ropion over the years for projects such as Vacheron Constantin’s “Égérie: The Pleats of Time” concept watch.
After meeting Yin ahead of the “Haute Dentelle” collective exhibition focusing on contemporary creation and couture in 2018, the curator was left with the impression of “a total artist” whose track record has “a great coherence.”
Marot also saw deep similarities between lace, a material made of “matter and void,” and Yin’s work.
“Her clothing doesn’t exist either without void and often, there is this sculptural work made of pleating, of moulage that results in [effects] we can’t quite explain,” she said. “There is a part of the work that [hinges] on the serendipity of having something by accident – despite having put in the work to get there.”
Known for her intricately pleated couture gowns, Yin is a graduate of Paris’ École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs and subsequently won the Grand Prize of Creation from the City of Paris in 2009. She was invited to present her first line at the Hyères festival in 2010 and went on to the ANDAM First Collections prize a year later.
A guest member of the couture calendar from 2012, she became in 2015 the first designer of Chinese descent to become a fully fledged member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture.
She served as creative director of Leonard for two years until 2015 and later, Poiret for two seasons.
Over the years the designer has also worked on projects spanning from a little black dress for a Monoprix capsule to costumes for a production of “Tristan et Yseult” at the Paris Opera. In addition to her couture business, she is currently continuing her collaboration with Vacheron Constantin, creating costumes for an upcoming dance production and has teamed with a designer working on objects meant to go into space.
Calais’ lace and fashion museum previously hosted exhibitions on Iris Van Herpen, Balenciaga, Hubert de Givenchy and teamed up with the Yves Saint Laurent Museum on “Yves Saint Laurent: Transparencies.”