Maternal Instinct

It’s a sense of disorder and surprise that shapes BFA fashion designer Haowei (Kamp) Yan’s senior thesis collection. Various shades of green clash with multicolored sections of muted yellow, pinks and blues, across which Chinese characters splay. An angular panel juts out from behind a dress like a sail, and the front of the dress drops lower than the back. All of his garments are cloaked in plastic. Yet these incongruities carry meaning beyond just textural medley. They embody Yan’s relationship with his mother, and his attempt to make sense of her particular style of communication.

When Yan returns home to China, he is usually alone in his mother’s company, as his dad is away at work. Yan will sit and eat with her in silence, without much direct communication. It is only when Yan sees what food his mother has purchased for him, that he will understand how she is feeling. If there are snacks, Yan knows his mother is pleased with him. If it’s vegetables, she’s not. “When there are vegetables I start looking back at the past few days, to see what I did wrong,” Yan shares. “Because you’re not going to see her mad. She’s always really calm.” 

This idea of inner and outer reality is prevalent throughout his collection. Yan incorporates pictures he took of bell peppers and the snack packaging his mother buys him by transferring them onto plastic vacuum bags. In Yan’s designs, sometimes the snack packaging motif covers the green of the pepper and other times, it’s reversed. It is a representation of his mother’s ambiguous disposition.

Even the design process is testament to their relationship. “Because of this special story, I want my final collection to be more than just a product,” Yan says. “I want people to know the story, the relationship, and how I arrived at the final result.”