Chi Yu Han and the gender divide in fashion

After studying fashion design as an undergraduate at Shih Chien University in Taipei, Han came to New York to join the Parsons MFA Fashion program. “I’m quite lucky because our MFA focuses on social issues, especially gender issues,” he says. It began with his first major project on the course. “For Design Studio 1, it all surrounded gender: what is masculinity, what is femininity?” A partnership with the Ali Forney Center, a New York City nonprofit which provides for homeless LGBTQ youth, this project tasked him with designing for a trans wearer. The experience left him “overwhelmed as well as really inspired.” Queerness influenced all his subsequent projects in the MFA, including his graduate collection, which aestheticizes the fragility of effeminate masculinity.

“There’s a really heavy stereotype in each type of clothes, but when you wear them together, they’re all blurred.”

His collection development began with a return to childhood. He filmed himself dancing and twirling in billowy dresses and skirts. He took stills from the videos as silhouette ideas but also paid close attention to how he felt in movement. “I enjoyed how the dress was flapping on my skin.” For his initial studies, he wore all white, but eventually, he graduated into busily-textured dresses and layers of clothing. These later studies became very symbolic to him. “There’s a really heavy stereotype in each type of clothes, but when you wear them together, they’re all blurred,” he says. “There are really beautiful moments where everything is equal.”

He decided to channel that blur into materiality development. He started collaging together various second-hand garments – ties, sportswear, floral-printed dresses – contorting delicate fabrics into baroque spirals with boning. He tried pleating fabric and carefully fanning it out into a new shape. He sampled with topstitching multiple layers of fabric and slicing through the top one to reveal glimpses of those beneath. All these techniques are represented in the final collection, and not just decoratively. “Four or five looks are all shaped by pleating,” he said, such as his “twisted dress shirt” which incorporates an asymmetrical swath of pleating into the pattern-cutting.

“Describing himself as a ‘self-driven designer’, Han prefers to try out ideas on himself rather than rely on a model.”

Describing himself as a ‘self-driven designer’, Han prefers to try out ideas on himself rather than rely on a model. He’ll pin something together on the dress form, take it off and put it on himself, take pictures, bring it back to the dress form, adjust, and repeat. Even when executing the final garments, he continued to practise this back-and-forth, always attuned to the feel and mobility of the garments. His self-reliance prepared him well for when the pandemic shut down Parsons in March, leaving him with nobody to drape on other than his own. In many ways, it actually made his process easier. Working at home, there’s no need to change in and out of his street clothes. “I can be naked all day,” he smiles.

The state of being, or rather, becoming naked informed Han’s silhouette development. A masculine lingerie look consisting of a singlet and briefs – his favourite ensemble of the collection – derives from the homoeroticism of seeing someone in formal dress on the street and imagining what he looks like undressed. Other looks revel in the play of showing the body, such as a shirt collaged from many ties boned into spirals, revealing little glimpses of skin in the negative space between them. Not all of the collection is so revealing, however, like a suit made from striping together suiting and shirting fabric.

“The heaviness of the pleated details against the unpleated sections creates a tension that ultimately pulls the garment down, a metaphor for the collapse of childhood.”

His collection also explores the relationship beyond father and gay son. Han moves beyond the stereotypical binary of acceptance/rejection, instead considering their relationship as a bricolage of masculinities, a ‘boyish nostalgia’ for when as a child he would navigate between his dad’s expectations and his own identity. This juxtaposition materializes in a sweatshirt made from pleating together suiting fabric, sportswear jersey, and chiffon. The heaviness of the pleated details against the unpleated sections creates a tension that ultimately pulls the garment down, a metaphor for the collapse of childhood. The flamboyance of the pleat inevitably wins out over the plainness of flat fabric.

The laborious intricacy of his pleating techniques prevented him from fully toileing out his collection. So instead he used elastic to develop those silhouettes: more an approximation than an ironclad plan. The ambiguity worked to his advantage, as it allowed him to keep a level of decision-making and spontaneous discovery in his work until each look was complete. Han delicately pulled apart each pleated section of a garment into the precise shape he wanted before sewing it into place, always deviating slightly from his original idea. “It’s a really long guessing process,” he says, still finishing up his thesis collection today. “You don’t know what will happen.”