Young French couturier Yiqing Yin has found rapid success since she launched her first collection in 2010. That year, she presented her creations at the prestigious Hyères International Festival, won the Grand Prix of Creation awarded by the City of Paris, and saw her designs displayed in the windows of the Culture Ministry and at the Théâtre National de Chaillot. The following year, her second collection, the Dreamer, was exhibited at the Hôtel de Crillon during the March 2011 Women’s Fashion week curated by Vogue Paris. A few months later, she was awarded the Andam Prize for First Collections. Then in 2012, she debuted as an invited guest during Haute Couture Fashion Week in Paris and successfully launched a ready-to-wear collection internationally. I recently sat down with the 27-year-old designer for a discussion about her practice.

A lot of your designs are very sculptural. Have you studied art?

I studied arts and crafts at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs for five years. We did many things, from sculpture and stage design to graphic design and photography. We studied space, objects, and images all together through different forms of expression. I always loved the sculptural element. Sculpture is very important when you put it in situ; it comes with the space surrounding it. That’s very important. And I see fashion as a way of sculpting on a living body as a support, using fabric as a medium. But it is something that is always moving, so it’s movement within a space and it needs to relate to its environment. It’s a moving sculpture, and the movement and the imprint that the body leaves behind as it moves—the grace, the body language—is all part of the final result. In a way, I have the original idea but it’s actually the person who wears the garment who finishes it.

What was the starting point for your Spring-Summer 2013 collection?

The thread, the line, and the unweaving motion of matter were the starting point. My mood board was dark, muted, and austere, with pictures of sculptures by the Russian artist Naum Gabo, who sculpted ethereal, hyperbolic volumes out of thread without ever invading the space. I was also influenced by thread sculptures by the artist Kai Chan. There were also bondage pictures with details of intricate knots and beautiful tensions with the skin, as well as rays of light decomposing into stardust, and spiderwebs with galactic compositions of water drops.

How different was this collection from previous ones?

The earlier collections were about the human body and animals. The last collection was more about the vegetal and the mineral. This time, it was about finding knots, tensions, and the tangling of shapes upon the body, as well as the unweaving movement of networks of matter around the body. The thread theme was a beautiful way to treat the contrast between its violence and sharpness on one hand and its complete fragility on the other. I liked this paradox, so I pushed the study of “lines,” from thread to fabric, fiber to ropes, chains, Swarovski line patterns, velvet devorés, metal rope sculpture, etc.

This collection had a few sculptural pieces, but was overall a much sleeker silhouette.

Indeed, the overall silhouette is a stretched-out vertical one, quite strict in a sense, and close to the body. Semi-structured tailoring, with details of draping in luxury Escorial fabric [the world’s finest naturally grown wool], which is traditionally used for menswear tailoring for outerwear, along with a lot of jerseys for dresses and skirts. I wanted the garments to be comfortable, flattering, and easy to relate to. All the sculptural and draping vocabulary is injected more subtly in fine details, but follows the landscape of the body without damaging its proportions, for a very wearable result. The piping on the front of the legs is one of the many small details found throughout the collection. Apart from the interesting variations in tone it provides, it helps highlight the verticality of the slim silhouette.