THE LANGUAGE
Idealism / Memory / Archive / Rupture / Optimism / Nostalgia
THE MATERIALS
Leather / Silk / Veneer
IF FASHION DISAPPEARED
He would make films. For Yuan, cinema and fashion are two sides of the same language. Both construct imagined spaces through which histories, people, and ideas can be retold. A longtime cinematic obsessive who has experimented with screenwriting himself, he has previously looked to Jean-Luc Godard and Luis Buñuel as references for his collections.
“Fashion and cinema are two sides of the same thing. They are different forms, but they can tell the same story.”
THE REBELLION
Against the homogenization of taste. Rather than claiming a single aesthetic rebellion for his generation, Yuan sees its resistance in multiplicity itself. In an increasingly fragmented and politically divided culture, he is less interested in replacing one dominant aesthetic with another than in protecting difference while searching for unexpected common ground.
THE MUSE
Faye Wong. Pop icon, cultural figure, and a presence capable of carrying something beyond the clothes themselves. For Yuan, the ideal wearer creates tension between beauty and ideology, provoking questions not simply about whether a garment is fashionable, but about who is wearing it, what they represent, and what history they carry with them.
THE FIELD NOTES
“A film from the last century where you’re not entirely sure what is happening.” Think Antonioni or Godard: beautiful, strange, fragmented, and deliberately ambiguous. Yuan’s world does not explain itself immediately. It leaves gaps, allowing memory, politics, nostalgia, and contradiction to coexist without resolving neatly into a single interpretation.
OPENING SCENE
A dark, ancient Buddhist temple in Shanxi, China. Outside, its walls remain scarred with slogans from the Cultural Revolution. Inside, the camera moves slowly between rows of weathered yet vividly painted sculptures. Their black glazed eyes appear almost alive in the darkness. The pace accelerates, face after face, eye after eye, until the camera becomes almost obsessively fixated on their gaze. Then, suddenly, it stops. One pair of eyes is staring directly back. They belong to the protagonist.
CURRENT FREQUENCY
Xavier Cugat / George Michael / Faye Wong / Massive Attack