Vogue Designer Swap: Reinterpreting Shie Lyu’s work in a creative-swap
Stella was thrilled to take part in Vogue’s creative-swap project – encouraging designers to upcycle their archival pieces by reinterpreting each other’s work. The result? A bold collaborative project with Shanghai and Chengdu-based womenswear designer Shie Lyu.
Tasked with reinterpreting Shie’s work, Stella and our design team opened the first mystery box shipped from Lyu’s Chengdu studio at our London atelier. It contained an Autumn 2022 floral-quilted cropped jacket and mini skirt set, a printed top, black tights and pearl-and-steel chokers.
There was a moment of pause where you think, ‘Gosh, this has happened in such a different part of the world’. I could see similarities in the dusty colour palette and the tension between the masculine and feminine. I was also blown away by the love put into the look – the intricate stitchwork, the level of detail.
Stella collaged Lyu’s pieces with upcycled denim swatches from our archive – tapping into our commitment to circularity – creating a tactile sea-of-blues patchworked trench coat. She picked up on the blues and built out the denim. Stella focused on only using deadstock materials into the reinterpretation, jigsaw-ing squares of 30 or so pairs of organic cotton denim jeans, embroidered trial swatches and samples of our S-Wave jacquard into a reversible trench complete with pockets and waistbands.
Shie Lyu is a Chinese womenswear designer, focused on exploring the endless avenues of craftsmanship. In each of Lyu’s collections, she includes fully handcrafted pieces ‘produced sustainably by recycling the leftovers, deadstock or flawed materials’.
I’d like to call myself an engineer or technophilic rather than a fashion designer... My first commercial collection happened during the beginning of COVID, so there’s nowhere to buy materials – you can only use what you have. That’s why I started to reuse and upcycle things left in my studio. I use a zero-waste pattern-cutting technique.
Lyu’s reinterpretation of our Summer 2023 runway RWS wool oversized blazer and suit trousers and recyclable brass chain top celebrated the precise construction of our tailoring. Shie turned the suit inside out and deconstructed it entirely, creating a tricolour corset and pencil skirt framed with the chains of our top. Lyu added a sculptural polyester train – nodding to her own design signatures – and freshened the palette with black and white panels repurposing the shoulder padding and lining of our jacket.
Lyu has collected accolades including finalist of Yu Prize 2021, ITS International Talent Support 2019, Big Design Award 2019, the semi-finalist of HM Design Award 2019, FashionScout Ones-to-Watch winner 2019AW, CFDA+ graduates 2018.
