There are few things more satisfying to this writer—or more telling of the technical skill of a designer—than a well-placed and utilized godet. Jingwei Yin’s fall show at Shanghai Fashion Week had those a plenty—he knitted them into clingy, slinky dresses and inserted them in silk frocks and skirts with such deftness they moved like foaming ocean water as his models walked.
Last season Yin built his collection around the idea of mourning—his wife had lost a loved one, and Yin, who is Buddhist, designed his way around understanding her Christian approach to grief. What he has been able to understand wholly, however, is the universal language of loss. “This collection was very emotional,” said the designer backstage, “I made it for my wife and what she’s experiencing,” he continued. “It’s about healing.”
Yin is the kind of designer whose language is so singular and precise, that his collections have unwavering aesthetic through-lines regardless of his initial inspirations. He extrapolated grief and his own acts of caring into a range of gestures that made this more introspective starting point meld well with the usual brazen sensuality of his clothes. The show opened with a fabulous plunging velvet cowl applied onto a sheer top, which Yin described as an embrace. Along those same lines were a range of generously cut frocks he draped seemingly starting from a knot at the navel; they floated around the body caressing it tenderly, expanding his more recognizable body conscious output away from the shape and revealing a looser side of his hand.
About those body-first styles—Yin proposed plenty, the most impactful consisted of a bodysuit with diagonal lines slashing the torso and a skirt suspended from a collar of rivets at the hip. They were a more abstract rumination of Yin’s ideas about human resilience, the way we break and heal over and over again.
The tailoring here was built with a more prominent shoulder than usual but equally as sharp—those longline coats should be sure retail bets. Yin often says that a key component of Oude Waag is the amalgamation of contradictory elements; but a series of corsets or double skirts fashioned from corduroy, denim, and jersey were slightly less convincing propositions, as they were not as resolved as his tailoring and eveningwear. Oude Waag has not been immune to the current volatility of the Chinese market, as neither have most of Yin’s counterparts. He has the right instinct in seeking to expand into daywear and, for lack of a better term, going-out-wear, but based on this collection, knitwear is where he should be able to commercialize more seamlessly.
“I’m trying to move forward a step each season,” Yin expanded on via text message the day after his show. He’s made his mark in China by doing just that, staying true to his unique brand of sensuality in a market often unreceptive to it. A slow burn that will surely reach the West soon enough.