After two seasons showing in Tokyo, Yueqi Qi brought her collection back to her native China, staging an off-calendar show on the first night of Shanghai Fashion Week. The designer described her collection as her very own “Ride of the Valkyries.” And while this nod to the Richard Wagner epic aligns with her idea of a group of Yueqi Qi-clad heroines fighting the pervasiveness of the URL in hopes to return to life IRL, one can’t help but place this depiction of a return to Valhalla against her own homecoming.
The Guangzhou-based Qi launched her label in 2019 after graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2018 and cutting her teeth as an intern at the Chanel embroidery atelier. She was a semifinalist for the LVMH Prize in 2022, and one of the emerging labels selected by Alessandro Michele to be part of the first edition of Gucci Vault. Qi’s interplanetary biomorphic aesthetic, with intricate floral fabrications made up of hundreds of laser cut petals, has become popular with celebrities—fans include FKA Twigs and Blackpink’s Lisa, for whom the designer made a painstakingly embellished corset for Coachella in 2023. Fun fact: Qi’s work featured in a couple of looks at the inaugural Vogue World in New York back in 2022. Needless to say, Yueqi Qi is very much a thing.
And so it should be no surprise that when Qi put a call out to her customers and asked them to donate their clothes for an upcycled project within this collection, they showed up in droves. They donated everything from jeans and sweaters to old headphones. What Qi understands well and knows to leverage is a concept that often eludes many of her counterparts: community. “They were excited to participate because it’s a different way of being a part of the brand,” Qi said at her showroom. Plus, they will all have the bragging rights to say that what they might have seen as trash Qi saw as worthy of turning into a runway-worthy treasure.
The headphones in question, many of which came from airlines, said Qi, were separated by color and braided and knitted into intricate floral ornaments and jewelry. The knits were unraveled and re-knitted into playful crochet flower dresses, and the denim and the rest of the garments were laser cut into hearts and layered over each other and pieces of recycled plastic to create Qi’s floral wonders. Adidas provided sneakers, which Qi deconstructed for the show to drive her upcycling storyline forward (they were cool and covetable, this is a budding partnership Adidas should pursue as a formal collaboration). Most outlandish was the way in which Qi incorporated Apple Watches into her opulent jewelry, encrusting them in crystals and using them in lieu of precious stones.
Qi has made a name for herself for the way in which she merges the natural with the futuristic, but her vision is equal parts timeless in its ingenuity and perfectly now in its wearability. Be it a space-y headphones headdress, a red carpet-ready cascading laser cut floral frock, or a pair of fabulous jeans to go to the store in, Qi is making her brand the fashion Valhalla for contemporary Valkyries.
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