iqing Yin wanted to be a sculptor. She studied at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, but the moment her hands encountered the fluidity of fabric, she knew this was how she wanted to express her creativity. She sketches around twenty per cent of her designs; the remainder comes into being intuitively as her hands meet, even confront, the fabric.
Yiqing Yin showed her debut collection at the International Festival of Fashion in Hyères, in 2010. Her first runway show followed a year later, in July 2011, with the entirely instinctive Ouvrir Vénus. It was a tiny space with few guests but, in a single collection, Yiqing Yin succeeded in drawing us into her dreamlike world.
In 2020 she joined Vacheron Constantin as One of Not Many. The 39-year-old haute couture designer doesn’t just lend her image, her wrist or her voice: the Manufacture consulted her for the Égérie watch that was introduced in early 2020. In April this year, a model she co-created was unveiled at the Watches and Wonders fair in Geneva. This one-off timepiece, which will remain in the brand’s legacy collection, combines the three arts of haute horlogerie, haute couture and haute parfumerie. The pleats that adorn the dial allude to Yin’s gowns while the embroidered strap, which she designed, releases a fragrance contained in microcapsules – an exclusive creation by master perfumer Dominique Ropion.
“We asked ourselves, how can we express time and timelessness in a fragrance?” Dominique Ropion explains. “We set out to create a floral scent, introducing a white flower note with honeysuckle and lily, which has the brightness and warmth of the sun. We enriched this with extracts of tuberose, orange blossom and immortelle absolute. Immortelle [also known as everlasting flower] evokes the passage of time. It has the scent of foam and the saltiness of the sea. Perfume fades with time but is also timeless, hence we included elements such as olibanum, myrrh, opopanax and oud that have been used for their fragrance since time immemorial.”
It took Vacheron Constantin, Yiqing Yin and Dominique Ropion two years to bring this project to fruition. But what time is it on this watch, which has no hour circle and a perfumed strap that diffuses the scent of golden immortelle, with its herbaceous, honeyed notes? We met Yiqing Yin to talk about the project.
Europa Star Jewellery: When creating a dress, you drape the fabric over the body, letting instinct do much of the work, whereas on a watch dial there is only limited space that leaves no room for improvisation. How did you create the pleating on the dial of Égérie – The Pleats of Time?
Yiqing Yin: It’s true. This intuitiveness, which is an intimate part of my work with fabric, a malleable material, is incompatible with watchmaking. It was a challenge to transpose the poetry of my world to such a precisely sculpted object. Rather than aestheticise the dial, I chose a simplicity that would suggest time as I wanted to express it – suspended time rather than measured time – hence we removed the hour markers to leave only the dial, which we reworked in successive waves, like my dresses. We also highlighted the moon-phase complication which I find terribly poetic. It’s a metaphor for dreaming; an invitation to experience a more oneiric, vaporous time than earthly time.
You’ve embellished the dial with a cascade of pleats. Are the beads where the two rows meet a subtle reference to a seamstress’s stitching?
There’s a stitch which I call “piqué au chic”. You won’t find it in any dictionary. I learned it from the former chef d’atelier at Yves Saint Laurent. You stab the needle into the fabric directly on the Stockman [mannequin] to secure the folds and drapes. So, yes, the microscopic gold beads suggest this way of holding pleats in place. We had to find a way round certain technical challenges, for example the difficulty of having a single row of pleats unfold from the centre of the dial. This double row of pleats, underscored by gold stitches, was a rather poetic solution.
The embroidered strap incorporates fragments of shell and suggests an underwater world. Where did the idea come from?
The first image, or rather the first sensation, that came to me for this project was one of water, an element present throughout my world. Water is weightless, it has no boundaries. It’s a floating, in-between space that is also incredibly powerful and generous. The embroidery for the strap was inspired by the undulations of water as it flows, like a landscape of rocks. The design is neither codified nor premeditated. It’s a form of automatic writing. I liked the idea of incorporating pieces of shell left over from the mother-of-pearl that was used for the dial. It’s a way of reinstating a natural element that would otherwise have been discarded. Shards of mother-of-pearl have such a beautiful luminosity.
The strap is embroidered in buttonhole stitch using silk thread, nylon thread and lamé thread, which we unpicked from remnants of vintage fabric that I keep in my archives. No-one can tell by looking at it, but I know. When creating an exceptional object, the journey is just as important, if not more important, than the end result. Everything is hand-executed. The stitching is by hand, the colour gradients are hand-dyed. I sketched the design and a professional embroiderer brought it to life.
We rarely see lilac on a watch. What made you choose this shade?
I deliberately chose an overtly feminine colour that conjures up an ethereal, floral environment. For me, lilac is the colour of dreams. I dream in cool, desaturated, pastel shades, lavender and violet, with acidic orange tints – colours that don’t necessarily exist in real life. It’s an invitation to experience a different state of being, another dimension. Lilac is also present in the shimmer of the mother-of-pearl dial.
Was the perfumed strap your idea?
The idea originated from an earlier collaboration with Dominique Ropion. He’d been commissioned to create a perfume for the French Pavilion at Expo 2020 in Dubai, and asked me to manifest the spirit of this perfume in a dress made from a fabric that had been microencapsulated with the fragrance. For the team at Vacheron Constantin, Dominique and myself, it seemed obvious that we should dovetail our three worlds and, as we unravelled that thread, we arrived at the poetic idea of a perfumed strap. The perfume helps take us out of linear time and into a different temporality, which is that of the creative act. Suspended time.
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- The embroidered strap of The Pleats of Time watch releases a fragrance contained in microcapsules, an exclusive creation by master perfumer Dominique Ropion. ©Vacheron Constantin
So you couldn’t have imagined anyone but Dominique Ropion as your companion on this journey?
We’ve been working together ever since my student days. Dominique designed a perfume to illustrate my graduation collection at the Paris school of decorative arts, and went on to create other fragrances as an illustration for certain of my collections. It’s a friendship that goes back many years.
You’ve created an haute couture dress to accompany the watch. What does it express?
A spirit of movement. It was made for the film that forms part of the project. This pleated dress is a metaphor for time, always moving, in constant transition, becoming other forms and other potentials. It had to be changing and expressive, a series of exponential swirling movements that create effects of transparency, opacity and shimmering reflections. It’s a living, breathing dress.
When looking at the dress from different angles, the colours appear to change. Was the fabric specially developed for this or dyed using a particular technique?
The dress is made from two fabrics that were dyed in different ways. I worked with a transparent silk, produced using artisanal methods by a manufacturer in Lyon that supplies haute couture houses. They are one of the last remaining companies in France to still employ traditional bath dyeing. The other, polyester fabric is an iridescent metallic colour, obtained thanks to a new technology of nano-dyeing which uses significantly less water. Microscopic metallic particles are sprayed across the surface of the fabric to produce ethereal, unreal colours. The dress appears to change colour depending on how light grazes its surface and, like petrol, reflect all the colours of the rainbow. It’s a new technology that’s currently being developed in Asia. It was really an experiment. I’m immensely fortunate, when working on this kind of project, to enjoy such vast creative freedom. Vacheron Constantin and I set no limits.
What if a client wanted the same model with a unique strap and fragrance?
It would be perfectly conceivable. This was never intended as a commercial project. It was always a poetic endeavour, purely for the beauty of it. The watch is a one-off creation but the possibilities are endless. It would be quite conceivable to sit down with a client and create a model especially for her, with a unique fragrance. A temporal portrait. She could even order the dress with the microencapsulated fragrance [laughs].
Did you stop designing collections because you no longer want to be part of the fashion world as it is today?
I never set out to be in fashion. I started expressing myself through fabric and designing clothes, but you can’t hope to achieve anything meaningful when you’re expected to produce eight collections a year [four for her own label and four for Léonard, when she was creative director]. I like to take my time, physically sculpt, pursue collaborations in dance or film, which I can now do. Be a multidisciplinary artist. I feel so much better for it. I’ve never defined myself as a designer serving an industry. More a creative nomad, hunting down inspiration. You have to accept to be on the sidelines of a system if you want to welcome projects that might surprise you or teach you something about the artist you can be. I want to do things well, take time to inscribe an emotion in what I do, and the Pleats of Time project elevates this creative time. To achieve something extraordinary, you must accept to lose yourself in time.
And what is that time?
The entire project revolves around this creative time. Letting your mind roam, away from noise and influences, as though surrounded by desert or cast away on an island. It takes discipline to get there. Discipline, negotiation, even resistance. It’s about resisting measurable, divisible, linear time and opening it up to give it potential. It all comes down to how we envisage time. Do we see time as an enemy, feeling constantly guilty and running to keep up, or on the contrary do we embrace time and make it our friend?
