After two seasons displaying in Tokyo, Yueqi Qi introduced her assortment again to her native China, staging an off-calendar present on the primary night time of Shanghai Trend Week. The designer described her assortment as her very personal “Experience of the Valkyries.” And whereas this nod to the Richard Wagner epic aligns together with her thought of a bunch of Yueqi Qi-clad heroines preventing the pervasiveness of the URL in hopes to return to life IRL, one can’t assist however place this depiction of a return to Valhalla towards her personal homecoming.

The Guangzhou-based Qi launched her label in 2019 after graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2018 and chopping her enamel as an intern on the Chanel embroidery atelier. She was a semifinalist for the LVMH Prize in 2022, and one of many rising labels chosen by Alessandro Michele to be a part of the primary version of Gucci Vault. Qi’s interplanetary biomorphic aesthetic, with intricate floral fabrications made up of lots of of laser reduce petals, has turn out to be in style with celebrities—followers embody FKA Twigs and Blackpink’s Lisa, for whom the designer made a painstakingly embellished corset for Coachella in 2023. Enjoyable reality: Qi’s work featured in a few appears on the inaugural Vogue World in New York again in 2022. Evidently, Yueqi Qi could be very a lot a factor.

And so it needs to be no shock that when Qi put a name out to her prospects and requested them to donate their garments for an upcycled venture inside this assortment, they confirmed up in droves. They donated every part from denims and sweaters to previous headphones. What Qi understands nicely and is aware of to leverage is an idea that usually eludes lots of her counterparts: group. “They had been excited to take part as a result of it’s a special manner of being part of the model,” Qi mentioned at her showroom. Plus, they may all have the bragging rights to say that what they could have seen as trash Qi noticed as worthy of turning right into a runway-worthy treasure.

The headphones in query, lots of which got here from airways, mentioned Qi, had been separated by colour and braided and knitted into intricate floral ornaments and jewellery. The knits had been unraveled and re-knitted into playful crochet flower clothes, and the denim and the remainder of the clothes had been laser reduce into hearts and layered over one another and items of recycled plastic to create Qi’s floral wonders. Adidas offered sneakers, which Qi deconstructed for the present to drive her upcycling storyline ahead (they had been cool and covetable, it is a budding partnership Adidas ought to pursue as a proper collaboration). Most outlandish was the best way through which Qi integrated Apple Watches into her opulent jewellery, encrusting them in crystals and utilizing them in lieu of valuable stones.

Qi has made a reputation for herself for the best way through which she merges the pure with the futuristic, however her imaginative and prescient is equal components timeless in its ingenuity and completely now in its wearability. Be it a space-y headphones headdress, a purple carpet-ready cascading laser reduce floral frock, or a pair of fabulous denims to go to the shop in, Qi is making her model the style Valhalla for modern Valkyries.