Museum Quality

Yeohlee Teng, Emphasizing The Design in Designer Fashion

NEW YORK

The fashion designer Yeohlee Teng has been in business for 24 years and in that time her clothes have hung in more museum exhibitions than department stores. Teng's most vociferous supporters are curators. They wear her designs, attend her runway presentations and, occasionally, even serve as models.

Her aesthetic sensibility is influenced most profoundly by architecture, rather than literary figures, television characters, 1950s socialites or their spawn. Her work is spare, efficient and comforting.

Last year she won a National Design Award from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Her work has been exhibited at the Hayden Gallery at MIT and it is part of the permanent collection at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She designed uniforms for the staffs at the three restaurants in the recently renovated Museum of Modern Art. And her $175 unisex holster-pocket apron sells briskly in the MOMA gift shop.

Teng is the darling of the art world. But her place in the fashion industry is much less clear.

"Yeohlee is rare," says Valerie Steele, director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where Teng's work has been the subject of a one-woman show. "The genealogy she represents is more Corbusier than Dior."

Teng is not aloof, but she typically doesn't engage in fashion politics and the faux intimacy that is so prevalent among her peers. Most readers of fashion magazines probably have never heard of her because she receives little attention in their pages. Her shows are not documented on Style.com and she is not dressing Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Lopez or other tabloid regulars. Teng is not vigorously pushing fashion in any new or trendy direction. She is loath to include anything as obvious as a logo or a hailstorm of beading on her clothes.

With Teng's clothes, form and function always peacefully coexist. A woman will always breathe easy in her clothes, never worry about an unexpected rain shower, never feel that her sexuality is too obvious. Teng, who designs under her first name alone, is a consummate modernist.

"I think people who design recognize the thinking process behind the end result. They understand modernism has to do with the use of materials, with solving a problem, with the awareness of a budget," Teng says. And that's not limited to the fashion community, she adds.

Teng describes her ideal customer as an "urban nomad" -- a woman who is in constant motion and for whom clothes function as portable shelter. Teng is a problem-solver, always searching for an answer to life's inconveniences, an intellectual conundrum or an aesthetic challenge. She experiments with fabric technology, making waterproof blazers, wrinkle-free shirts and stain-resistant dresses coated in Teflon. Although her designs are quite attractive, she doesn't make traditionally sexy or pretty clothes -- with ruffles, lace, exuberant beadwork. She makes thoughtful attire, putting an enormous amount of brainpower into something as simple as a seam on a skirt.

"I like the details to be part of the energy and the construction of the clothes," Teng says. "If I cut a skirt on the bias, when you step forward, it catches on the hip bone. It's sexy in a subtle way. To be subtle, it's interesting and challenging."

In Teng's way of thinking, a garment is like a room. One size should fit all -- at least whenever possible. She extends the analogy to include the construction of armholes, pant legs and necklines. These openings, she says, are like windows, and when she considers their placement -- besides the most functional concerns -- she worries about framing, aesthetics and environment. She obsesses about necklines and the way they highlight the face and show off the clavicle. A jewel neckline is never just happenstance in her collection. It is considered, debated and mulled.