Wearables— “Frame”

EDM Rings // Shear Wristwear // Horse-Arriving Series // Petal Series // Facet Series // Dragonfly Series // Loop Rings 03 & 07 // Loop Rings 02, 05, & 06

While we have never set out to create “fashion”, being interested in exploring the territory of consumable and wearable products as a message-bearing medium has fueled the forming of Yeh Design Lab. Through its Frame Series, the lab investigates the following aspects through its wearable objects disguised as what retail stores and consumers generally view as “jewelry”.

Materiality & Manufacturing Processes
Utilizing technology as a transformative engine, materiality is engaged, amplified, and critiqued. An expanding array of techniques, including Rubber Casting, Leather Forming, Wire Electrical Discharge Machining (Wire EDM), Laser Cutting, CNC Routing, Felt Molding, 3D Printing, and photo-chemically machining (PCM), have been employed in the creation of the Yeh Design Lab products, working with a palette of natural materials: leather, bird feathers, wool felt, paper, metal, rubber, and wood. The resulting work occupies a tense and sensual intersection between these primitive materials and the advanced methods through which they are produced and assembled.

Topological Transformation
The desire to transform linear or planar materials into volumes plays a large part in the design of the Frame Series. In the case of the Dragonfly Neckwear, in its metal version, a sheet of stainless steel is photo-chemically machined with expandable cut patterns and hand-formed into a permanent three-dimensional shape; in its leather version, the three-dimensionality is attained with the same pattern but naturally formed around the wearer’s body. On the other hand, with the Facet Series, the success of the product relies on the material maintaining localized planarity against the overall material, worn and formed in three dimensions. With the Shear Wristwear, the cuff in its three-dimensional form is displayed next to its flat-packed version. Still, customers routinely omit the connection of the two displayed forms and are surprised when elucidated by the shopkeepers. In the case of the Loop Rings, which draw inspiration from mathematical concepts like the Möbius strip*, linear material is formed into a complex looping pattern, allowing the ring to stand up on its own.

Sensuality & Sexuality
In 2022, Yeh Design Lab gave a presentation titled Nonnons** – through the mirror of my digital SLR at the Creatives in Conversation hosted by AIA Los Angeles. The talk and the discussion focused on the creative role of photography as a part of the design feedback loop that fuels the passion and drives the subsequent designs. This topic is further discussed in the Root Series and the Shear Wristwear, but we would like to take this opportunity to thank all those beautiful friends who modeled and contributed their creativity during the photoshoots for the Root, Frame, and Vehicle Series. All photos were shot & post-processed by Yi-Hsiu Yeh, and the models are: (in the order of the years modeled)

Kristi Daggett (as seen posing nude in EDM Rings, Shear Wristwear, A4 Bag, Möbius Bag, and Elephant Bag)
Alejandra Olivarez (as seen in Petal 133, Butterfly Bag, and Truss Platform Boots)
Dagmar Wien (as seen in Dragonfly Series, A4 Bag, and Elephant Bag)
Nicholas Gillock (as seen in Elephant Bag)
Erin Boehme (as seen in Horse Arriving Series and Loop Rings 02, 03, 05, 06 and 07)

Last but not least, special thanks to the Yeh Design Lab staff involved with the development of the wearable designs and many prototypes not included on the website:

Charles Ghiotto (Petal Series, Facet Series, Butterfly Bag, Eisenmann Sandals, and Origami Clutch as a part of the Kinetic Bloom installation)
Gregory Dulgeryan (Facet Series, many 3D-printed prototypes, and 421 Westlake House not included on the website)
Cindy Davila (Origami Clutches prototypes not included on the website)
Maria Petrova (Loop Rings 02, 03, 05, 06 and 07)

*A Möbius strip is a surface with only one side and one boundary. It is a non-orientable object, meaning it does not have a distinct “inside” or “outside.” This creates a continuous surface that challenges our typical understanding of geometry.

** “Nonnons” originated in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Invitation to a Beheading as a group of absurd, monstrous, and incomprehensible objects that can only be normal and understandable when reflected in a special mirror.