Making Scents of Design: Couturier Yiqing Yin On Fusing Art, Perfume and Haute Couture Together

The former artistic director continues to push fashion frontiers with a gown crafted from fragrance-imbued fabric, on display at Expo. Here, she re-examines her relationship with the industry she loves

For designer Yiqing Yin – who for over a decade has been a fixture on the Paris fashion scene with her signature haute couture line and her years as artistic director, first of Leonard and later Paul Poiret – fashion seems to have morphed into a foundation upon which she wants to tell larger, more collaborative stories.

Truth be told, Yiqing has always played nicely with others and very early on in her career was building partnerships with some of the biggest names in luxury, long before it was de rigueur in the industry. Houses like Cartier, Hermès, Swarovski, Lancôme and Guerlain have all teamed up with Yiqing over the years. More recently she became the face of Vacheron Constantin’s Égérie women’s watch line. And for Expo 2020, she dovetailed her skills as a designer with that of master perfumer Dominique Ropion to create a dress that – through cutting-edge technology – was constructed with fabric infused with a fragrance created especially for the French pavilion.

Will the future of the fashion industry be one where designers collaborate and create, not according to the demands of big business, but rather their own artistic need for self expression? Yiqing certainly hopes so.

Throughout your entire career, you have always been a collaborative creator. Even before it was fashionable, you’ve been comfortable moving into other artistic realms. What kind of skill set do you need to be able to do that?

It just takes curiosity. It takes a bit of dissatisfaction with things. It takes a desire for discovery or pushing the boundaries, the limits, pushing the definitions further. I think that as a designer, your role is really to identify the problems and propose solutions in life. In order to renew inspiration, the mission is to always step out of your comfort zone. You have to take the chance to go with what you don’t know, go that extra mile to a new technology, to a new character, to a personality that might sting you a bit. But maybe this positive trauma, as I like to call it, will bring something extraordinary.

The perfect example of continuing to inspire yourself is actually what brought you to Dubai for the first time, isn’t that right?

Yes. I was invited to create and showcase a special piece in the context of Expo 2020 for France’s pavilion, which is focused on the idea of innovation. So the story behind this project, really starts with my friendship with Dominique Ropion, who is a master perfumer. Back in 2008, I was still a student and there was a collaboration with my school and IFF (International Flavors & Fragrances). Dominique saw one of my dresses, liked it and said he wanted to work with me. He ended up creating a perfume for my collection. And that inspired me so much because it made me talk about my creations, put them into words so that he could translate that into fragrances, into equations, into essences that he would propose to me. The scent he created illustrates the collection in a fragrance. This time around Dominique was asked to create a perfume for France’s pavilion and I wanted to translate that into a dress.

So you flipped the script. The perfume that he created for the pavilion, you wanted to manifest it physically?

Into a story of a fabric, of lights, of textural sensations. Obviously when you create for Expo, you need to look to the future and combine technological aspects into the design as well. The art of this technology is that it infuses the scent into each fibre of the dress in a permanent way. It emotes or emanates on contact or when it rubs against the skin. Which I thought was very poetic because the dress itself is a materialisation of my reaction to the scent. But also it is really a fusion between art, the perfume and haute couture. Because the dress actually is the perfume. And so it’s permanent. Even if you wash the dress the scent will stay, it’s woven into the very threads of the dress.

The dress looks very organic, as if Mother Nature had a hand in creating it.

The dress is made of crystal, but the fabric that is used is fitted, it is the lightest fabric, it weighs like five milligrams per square metre. So it’s almost like air, it’s really hard to stitch and to control. It’s really like a creature. It’s a flower dress. It evokes the biological nature of flowers, internal nature. My creative universe is very organic. The exoskeleton of the dress is all in curves, the inside of the petals of flowers. All of it is in reference to the essence of narcissus and jasmine which are encapsulated in the perfume, which are white flowers, very light. They look nice and pretty, but in fact, the scent has very complex transformations. So I wanted to create something that was halfway between an animal and a flower, like a moving living organism.

You are also collaborating with Vacheron Constantin and since 2020 you have been the face of their Égérie women’s watch collection. Again this feels like a somewhat unexpected partnership.

That conversation started in 2018. I didn’t know much about fine watchmaking but it really came down to the values of the brand, like its quest for excellence, its passion for doing things for the beauty of the gesture. Wanting to explore and not compromising, taking the time to do something right. And then COVID happened I gained a whole other appreciation of the idea of time. The real luxury is to have time. To have the time to lose time in order to incubate something extraordinary. Vacheron Constantin has a heritage that is not only about exceptional skills and knowledge for watchmaking, but also in this very human-oriented value where for something extraordinary to happen or to be found, you need to accept to let time play its role.

“We are stronger and more creative together because we challenge each other”

The tag line for the people Vacheron Constantin has tapped to be its brand ambassadors is: “One of Not Many” – does that description resonate with you?

It’s about someone who is not afraid to step out of the box, to take chances, experiment with new things. Think where other people don’t think, look where other people don’t look and dance new paths. But circling back to the topic and perception of time, it also changed for me when I became a mother just before COVID hit, that is also why I decided to take a beat and slow down.

So how has becoming a mother changed your perspective in terms of what you decided to focus your energy and your time on?

You’ve known me when I was doing eight collections a year. When I was doing haute couture and my other collections to support the haute couture. You’ve seen the state of me, you’ve seen the frustration. Sometimes I wasn’t even satisfied with the things that I delivered and that’s the saddest feeling. With both these projects instead of always rushing to the next I took the time to find the values of Vacheron Constantin and with the Expo project I think that the dress took 800 hours for me to make. And for the first time in nearly seven years, I did everything by myself, I stitched everything, I cut everything. I went back to the fundamentals and I went back to the reality of creation.

So for you, fashion seems to have transformed into more of a jumping off point for a larger idea of artistic expression. With that in mind, what is the path forward for you?

It’s freedom. Where I can go back to what is the original function of love of my work. What I had when I was a student or from my first collections, back to this level of effort. That’s where I find new techniques and new ways to manipulate the forms, new architecture. And I’ve been cutting myself off from that, because of the pace, more and more over the years. There is no way I’m going back to that way of working. There are new ways to showcase my ideas, maybe showing them of in art fairs, and collaborating because I do believe in the value of community. A community of artists that stops thinking individually. It’s about connecting minds and finding that collective memory, trauma and love. We are stronger and more creative together because we challenge each other.

Images: Vacheron Constantin, Yiqing Yin

From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s March 2022 issue