Yeohlee Teng is an American

fashion Fashion is a form of self-expression and autonomy at a particular period and place and in a specific context, of clothing, footwear, lifestyle, accessories, makeup, hairstyle, and body posture. The term implies a look defined by the fashion in ...

designer A designer is a person who plans the form or structure of something before it is made, by preparing drawings or plans. In practice, anyone who creates tangible or intangible objects, products, processes, laws, games, graphics, services, or exp ...

originally from

Malaysia Malaysia ( ; ) is a country in Southeast Asia. The federation, federal constitutional monarchy consists of States and federal territories of Malaysia, thirteen states and three federal territories, separated by the South China Sea into two r ...

and of

Chinese Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of va ...

heritage. She received the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt

National Design Award The American National Design Awards, founded in 2000, are funded and awarded by Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is a design museum housed within the Andrew Carnegie Mansion in Manhattan, New Y ...

for fashion design in 2004. Her work has been displayed at the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...

and Victoria & Albert,

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

Education

She hails from

Penang Penang ( ms, Pulau Pinang, is a Malaysian state located on the northwest coast of Peninsular Malaysia, by the Malacca Strait. It has two parts: Penang Island, where the capital city, George Town, is located, and Seberang Perai on the Malay ...

where she attended St. George's Girls' School. She moved to New York in the 1970s to study fashion at the

Parsons School of Design Parsons School of Design, known colloquially as Parsons, is a private art and design college located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Founded in 1896 after a group of progressive artists broke away from established Manhatt ...

. She has worked primarily in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

and established her own house, YEOHLEE inc in 1981.

Work

Yeohlee practices sustainable and universal design. She uses zero waste methods to create multi-functional garments. Yeohlee believes that "clothes have magic." She dresses the "urban nomad", a term she coined for 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, seasonless clothes. Andrew Bolton, curator of the

Costume Institute The Anna Wintour Costume Center is a wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's main building in Manhattan that houses the collection of the Costume Institute. The center is named after Anna Wintour, the longtime and current editor-in-chief of ''V ...

of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, stated that Yeohlee shares the vision of the Victoria and Albert Museum founders to both promote and further the use of newly developed processes within the field. On her views on decoration, Bolton stated that Yeohlee views ornament as intrinsic to their construction and as acceptable only when justified by construction, lending her dresses distinction and refinement while empowering the wearer and facilitating movement. Yeohlee published ''YEOHLEE: WORK'' in 2003, which surveys the 20 years of her practice with essays by prominent fashion, art and design curators and critics. Yeohlee spearheaded the Made in Midtown project as General Secretary on the board of the

Council of Fashion Designers of America The Council of Fashion Designers of America, Inc. (CFDA), founded in 1962 by publicist Eleanor Lambert, and headquartered in Manhattan, is a not-for-profit trade association comprising a membership of over 450 American fashion and accessory des ...

and in partnership with the Design Trust for Public Space and Making Midtown YEOHLEE’s collections are designed, developed and produced in New York’s Garment District. Today the store and workroom is located at 12 West 29th Street in the

NoMad A nomad is a member of a community without fixed habitation who regularly moves to and from the same areas. Such groups include hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads (owning livestock), tinkers and trader nomads. In the twentieth century, the popu ...

Flatiron District The Flatiron District is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan, named after the Flatiron Building at 23rd Street, Broadway and Fifth Avenue. Generally, the Flatiron District is bounded by 14th Street, Union Square and Green ...

. Yeohlee Teng is on the board of the

Municipal Art Society of New York The Municipal Art Society of New York (MAS) is a non-profit membership organization for preservation in New York City, which aims to encourage thoughtful planning and urban design and inclusive neighborhoods across the city. The organization was ...

Exhibitions

Her clothing designs have been creative and unusual right from the beginning of her career in the early 1980s. She believes that clothing is an intimate form of architecture. She has established her name for strong geometric designs and concise functualism. Exhibitions of her designs have been held for more than 40 years now. Yeohlee's work, often described as "architectural," attracted the attention of critics and professionals in other fields of design. To an extent unusual for fashion designers, her clothes were exhibited as design art in many museums and galleries in the 1990s and early 2000s. Her participation in the group show Intimate Architecture: Contemporary Clothing Design, presented at the Hayden Gallery at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982, won a great deal of favorable attention for her work and was an important factor in the early success of her company. Quoted in the New York Times, designer

Issey Miyake was a Japanese fashion designer. He was known for his technology-driven clothing designs, exhibitions and fragrances, such as '' L'eau d'Issey'', which became his best-known product. Life and career Miyake was born on 22 April 1938 in Hirosh ...

said Yeohlee's exhibit "proves that fashion no longer has to be separated from the other design fields. At its best, it is considerably more than a craft. It must represent its time. That M.I.T. has staged this show validates fashion and may inspire students here not to become electrical engineers but engineers of fashion.''
ultracontemporary

Phoenix Art Museum The Phoenix Art Museum is the largest museum for visual art in the southwest United States. Located in Phoenix, Arizona, the museum is . It displays international exhibitions alongside its comprehensive collection of more than 18,000 works of ...

, October 27, 2018 - March 24, 2019
Fashion Unraveled

The Museum at FIT The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) is a public college in New York City. It is part of the State University of New York (SUNY) and focuses on art, business, design, mass communication, and technology connected to the fashion industry. I ...

, May 25, 2018 - November 17, 2018
YEOHLEE , SERRA
at Phoenix Art Museum, March 17, 2017 - May 29, 2017
Folk Couture: Fashion and Folk Art

American Folk Art Museum The American Folk Art Museum is an art museum in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, at 2, Lincoln Square, Columbus Avenue at 66th Street. It is the premier institution devoted to the aesthetic appreciation of folk art and creative expressions of ...

, January 21, 2014 - April 23, 2014
Front Row: Chinese American Designers

Museum of Chinese in America The Museum of Chinese in America (; abbreviated MOCA) is a museum in New York City which exhibits Chinese American history The history of Chinese Americans or the history of ethnic Chinese in the United States includes three major waves of C ...

, April 26, 2013 - December 1, 2013
IMPACT: 50 Years of the CFDA
The Museum at FIT, February 10, 2012 - April 17, 2012
Yield: Making Fashion Without Making Waste

The Dowse Art Museum The Dowse Art Museum is a municipal art gallery in Lower Hutt, New Zealand. Opening in 1971 in the Lower Hutt CBD, The Dowse occupies a stand-alone building adjacent to other municipal facilities. The building was completely remodelled in 2 ...

, New Zealand, March 26, 2011 - June 26, 2011
American Beauty: Aesthetics and Innovation in Fashion
The Museum at FIT, November 6, 2009 - April 10, 2010
YEOHLEE: Design For Now
Crow Collection of Asian Art, Dallas, TX, October 3, 2009 - January 3, 2010
Fashioning Felt

Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is a design museum housed within the Andrew Carnegie Mansion in Manhattan, New York City, along the Upper East Side's Museum Mile. It is one of 19 museums that fall under the wing of the Smithsonian Inst ...

, New York, NY, March 6 - September 7, 2009 *
Breaking the Mode: Contemporary Fashion from the permanent collection
', Los Angeles County Museum of Art, September 17, 2006 - January 7, 2007
blog.mode: addressing fashion
Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, December 18, 2007 - April 13, 2008
Exoticism
The Museum at FIT, New York, NY, November 27, 2007 - May 7, 2008
Contromoda
Centre for Contemporary Arts at

Palazzo Strozzi Palazzo Strozzi is a palace in Florence, Italy. History The construction of the palace was begun in 1489 by Benedetto da Maiano, for Filippo Strozzi the Elder, a rival of the Medici who had returned to the city in November 1466 and desired the ...

, Florence, Italy, October 12, 2007 - January 20, 2008 *Luxury, The Museum at FIT, New York, NY, May 23 - November 10, 2007
SKIN+BONES: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture

Somerset House Somerset House is a large Neoclassical complex situated on the south side of the Strand in central London, overlooking the River Thames, just east of Waterloo Bridge. The Georgian era quadrangle was built on the site of a Tudor palace ("O ...

, London, April 24, 2008 - August 10, 2008,

, London, April 24, 2008 - August 10, 2008; The National Art Center, Tokyo, June 6, 2007 - August 13, 2007; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, November 19, 2006 - March 5, 2007 *THE FASHION OF ARCHITECTURE: Constructing the Architecture of Fashion, Center for Architecture, New York NY, January 11, 2006 - March 11, 2006 *The New China Chic, Festival of China, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, DC, October 2005 *YEOHLEE: SUPERMORDERN STYLE, The Museum at FIT, New York, NY, October 23, 2001 - January 5, 2002
YEOHLEE: Fashion in Motion
Victoria & Albert Museum, London, October 30 - December 4, 2000 *The Super Modern Wardrobe,

London College of Fashion The London College of Fashion is a constituent college of the University of the Arts London, in London, England. It offers undergraduate, postgraduate, short courses, study abroad courses and business-training in fashion, make-up, beauty-therap ...

, London, November 2 - December 6, 2000 *Mutations//Mode 1960:2000,

Palais Galliera The Palais Galliera, also formally known as the Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris (City of Paris Fashion Museum), and formerly known as Musée Galliera, is a museum of fashion and fashion history located at 10, avenue Pierre 1er de Serbie, ...

, Paris, March 30 - July 31, 2000
China Chic: East Meets West
The Museum at FIT, New York, NY, February 16 - April 24, 1999 *Energetics: Clothes and Enclosures, Aedes East Gallery, Berlin, May 22 - June 19, 1998 and the

Netherlands Architecture Institute The Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) was a cultural institute for architecture and urban development, which comprised a museum, an archive plus library and a platform for lectures and debates. The NAI was established in 1988 and was ba ...

, Rotterdam, August 1 - September 6, 1999
Cubism and Fashion
Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, December 10, 1998 - March 14, 1999 *The New Couture,

Museum of the City of New York A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make these i ...

, New York, NY, November 20, 1984 - June 16, 1985 *Yeohlee Teng/ Fashion,

MoMA PS1 MoMA PS1 is a contemporary art institution located in Court Square in the Long Island City neighborhood in the borough of Queens, New York City. In addition to its exhibitions, the institution organizes the Sunday Sessions performance series, th ...

, New York, NY, January 22 - March 18, 1984 *Intimate Architecture: Contemporary Clothing Design, Hayden Gallery, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, May 15 - June 27, 1982

Press Coverage

* "Yeohlee Fall 2021 Ready-to-Wear" - May 10, 2021
Vogue
*"Yeohlee RTW Fall 2021" - April 30, 2021
WWD
*"Amber Valletta & Fern Mallis Host Goodwill NYNJ Sustainable Fashion & COVID Fundraising Virtual Event 1/28" - January 28, 2021

* "Designers Pitching in With Goodwill NYNJ Virtual Event" - January 25, 2021
WWD
* "Jean Shafiroff: As You've Never Seen Her Before!" - November 6, 2020
Look Online
* "The Election Question: First Presidential Priority" - November 4, 2020
WWD
* "Yeohlee Spring 2021 Ready-to-Wear Collection" - October 7, 2020
Vogue.com
* "Yeohlee RTW Spring 2021" - September 30, 2020
WWD
* "10 Fashion Sustainability Initiatives to Know" - September 15, 2020
WWD
* "I LOVE NY: New York Fashion Moments From the Fairchild Archive"- September 14, 2020
WWD
* "The Asian-American Fashion Designers Who Shaped the Industry" - April 13, 2020

* "Yeohlee RTW Fall 2020" - February 13, 2020
WWD
* "Yeohlee RTW Spring 2020" - September 11, 2019
WWD
* "New York Spring 2020 Designer Inspirations: Part One" - September 4, 2019
WWD
* "Garment District Modernization Takes Step Closer to Fruition" - August 21, 2019
WWD
* "What Should Tom Ford's Top Priorities Be at the CFDA?" - March 20, 2019
WWD
* "Yeohlee RTW Fall 2019" - February 1, 2019
WWD
* "What Is the Current State of American Fashion?" - September 4, 2018
WWD
* "American Designer Yeohlee Teng on Why 'Clothes Have Magic'" - August 24, 2018
Luxury Daily
* "Yeohlee Resort 2019" - June 7, 2018
WWD
* "Where to Find Made in NYC Clothing and Accessories" - May 4, 2018
City Guide NY
* "The Fashion Industry Fights to Preserve Manhattan's Garment District" - May 2, 2017
Digiday
* "Phoenix Art Museum Unveils 'Yeohlee, Serra' Exhibition, Combining Fashion and Art" - March 17, 2017
WWD
* "Yeohlee, CF Goldman Display Versatile and Thoughtful Designs" - February 20, 2017
NY1
* "Yeohlee Teng to Team With Richard Serra for Phoenix Art Museum Installation" - February 14, 2017
WWD
* "Yeohlee Fall 2017 Runway" - February 14, 2017
The Fashion Spot
* "Anjelica Huston Wears Yeohlee at Vanity Fair Oscar Party" - February 28, 2016
WWD
* "New York Fashion Week Through the Years" - September 10, 2015
CHRON
* "A Studio Grounded in Her Beliefs" - September 22, 2010

* "Inside the Garment Center: Yeohlee Teng Takes Us to Regal Originals" - July 1, 2010
Fashionista
* "Needle and Thread Still Have a Home" - April 28, 2010

References

Sources

Chou, Jerome, ed. ''Making Midtown: A New Vision for a 21st Century Garment District in New York City''. Design Trust for Public Space, 2012. Khoo Salma Nasution, Alison Hayes & Sehra Yeap Zimbulis: ''Giving Our Best: The Story of St George's Girls' School, Penang, 1885-2010'', Areca Books, 2010. Major, John, ed. ''YEOHLEE : WORK''. Australia: The Images Publishing Group Pty Ltd, 2003. Sidlauskas, Susan, ''Intimate Architecture: Contemporary Clothing Design'', Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1982.

External links

* Official site

* * New York Times article

* Merge magazine profile

* The Laws of Style podcast hosted by Douglas Hand, March 27, 2019

National Endowment for the Arts podcast, July 12, 2012

Vogue Italia success stories

Interview with David Rosen
{{DEFAULTSORT:Yeohlee, Teng American fashion designers of Chinese descent American fashion designers High fashion brands Living people People from Penang Malaysian emigrants to the United States Year of birth missing (living people)