Students’ embroidery skills on show
Print Edition
Students and teachers of Jiading-based Shanghai Art & Design Vocational School have stunned the audience with a fashion show demonstrating nearly 70 costumes and accessories featuring the distinctive embroidery skills of the Yi nationality in southwest China’s Yunnan Province.
The costumes demonstrate the beauty and practicality of traditional Yi embroidery from the province.
Last summer, the school’s headmaster Cang Ping led a group of teachers and students to visit the Yunnan city of Chuxiong. During the trip, teacher Guo Liying and her students developed a fresh concept of Yi embroidery. Guo paid three more visits to the area with her students, collecting patterns of Yi embroidery and applying them into the costumes.
Guo was amazed by the rich resources of beauty among the people living in the mountainous area.
She got to know Li Ruxiu, a cultural inheritor of Yi embroidery in her 60s. Li started to learn the skills when she was 16 years old. She used all her savings to collect old Yi embroidery pieces. As the old Yi embroidery pieces were not sterilized or cleaned, the odor from the embroidery made Li lose some sense of smell and eyesight after years of hard work.
“Li didn’t give up Yi embroidery, and her passion inspired me,” Guo recalled. “I hope to make cultural and innovative works with the inspirations from the traditional elements in the old embroidery pieces.”
Digital record
Guo plans to use digital technology to make records of old Yi embroidery pieces and infuse Yi embroidery elements into modern designs.
Like Guo, Wu Han, a junior student from the fashion design department, said what matters most to him and his tutor is the Yi nationality costumes’ practicality, pleasing to the eye and easy to reproduce.
“We put ethnical elements of the Yi nationality into our design, including the Left Foot Dance and characters of the Yi nationality,” Wu added.
What impressed Wu most during his trips to Yunnan was the Left Foot Dance. On the New Year’s Eve of the Yi nationality, he saw lots of locals dancing in a square. So he used scissors to cut the left lower hem of his designed clothes into tassels, which are symbols of enthusiasm.
Wu saw a lot of characters of the Yi nationality at the local cultural museum. He made symbols from the characters and applied them to the costumes to enrich their design.
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