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YEOHLEE: WORK MATERIAL ARCHITECTURE, edited by John S. Major and Yeohlee Teng. Melbourne Australia: Images Publishing, 224 pages, $65.
Using the word "architecture" has become fashionable in fasion circles to give a semblance of depth to a field lacking much of a history of critical discourse. Clothing designer Yeohlee Teng, though, as always thought of her work in
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architectural terms creating elegantly disciplined garments envisioned as a shelter for the body and engineered to minimize waste of fabric, labor, and time. Born in Malaysia but long based in New York, Yeohlee first made a name for herself with a hauntingly simple campe that Robert Mapplethorpe wrapped around Lisa Lyon in a famous photograph in
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1982. Remarkably, the cape is made from one piece of fabric, with no waste.
Since then, Yeohlee has explored structure, enclosure, and movement in clothing, using both innovative and
traditional materials. She designs for people she calls "urban nomads," modern individuals who don't have time to change their clothes as they run from a busienss meeting in New York to a flight to Kuala Lumpur. In 1998, she exhibited her designs at a Netherlands Architecture Institute/NAI alongside the buildings of Ken Yeang, with whom she grew up in Penang.
Reflecting Yeohlee's intellectual approach to clothing design, this book includes a collection of thoughtful essays by people such as Museum of Modern Art curator Paola Antonelli, Walker Art Center curator Richard Flood, and Richard Martin, who was the curator in charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until his death in 1999.
Not surprisingly, the book itself sports a crisply modern design with plenty of white space and a striking black-and-white cover that shows how powerful simplicity can be. CLIFFORD A. PEARSON
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