2026 | Professional

French Design Awards Gold Winner

Entanglement

Entrant

Yaqi Zhan

Category

Fashion Design - Avant-Garde

Client's Name

Country / Region

United States

Entanglement is a collection about the fragility of human connection in the contemporary city: the rapid intimacies, the unspoken tensions, and the quiet erosion that defines how we move through urbanized life.

The collection takes its visual and emotional cues from Meili Snow Mountain in my hometown in China, a landscape whose majestic exterior conceals instability beneath. Its shifting ridges, fractured surfaces, and unpredictable textures became a metaphor for interpersonal relationships: how closeness forms quickly, how it strains under pressure, and how souls become entwined on delicate, breakable strings.

This tension is translated into garments through fragmented construction, exposed cut-outs, and intertwined silhouettes that read as both protective shells and shattered selves. Tailoring is deconstructed and reassembled through layered button positioning, allowing the wearer multiple ways to dress, a reflection of how identity itself shifts in proximity to others. Triangular paneling on trousers and skirts mimics the jagged geology of mountain ridges, while knitwear developed with mixed thin and thick yarns translates the texture of weathered terrain into something tactile and worn.
A satin mermaid gown captures the concept at its most refined: fluid and seductive on the surface, structurally complex underneath.

The palette moves between earth and shadow, echoing the duality of warmth and danger that defines fragile bonds. Through fabric manipulation, draping, and pattern exploration, Entanglement asks what it means to remain whole in a world built on fast, fleeting closeness, and how clothing, like connection itself, can hold us together even as it begins to come apart.

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