266
Fashion often begins with aesthetics. For emerging designer Jiayi Yin, however, it begins with observation. Rather than asking what a garment should look like, she first asks who the person wearing it is—what anxieties they carry, what systems they navigate, and what invisible performances define their everyday lives. Clothing, in this sense, is never simply an object to be worn, but a way of making larger human experiences visible. This character-driven approach has become the defining methodology of Jiayi’s practice, distinguishing her work through its balance of conceptual storytelling and technical precision. While earlier collections drew heavily from cyberpunk aesthetics and speculative futures, her latest work marks a significant shift toward examining the realities of contemporary life. That evolution culminated in The____Resume, the graduate collection that not only represents Jiayi most clearly as a designer today, but also fundamentally transformed the way she approaches fashion itself.
The____Resume is Jiayi Yin’s thesis collection examining the relationship between professional identity and the self. Emerging from the growing anxiety of a generation navigating uncertain job markets, career pivots, and the pressure to define themselves through what they do, the collection asks a deceptively simple question: What if a job title didn’t have to mean so much? Jiayi approaches that question through fictional, exaggerated workplace archetypes—characters whose roles range from the recognizable to the deliberately absurd, turning the performance of being employed into a form of satire. Rather than diminishing ambition, the collection proposes a different way of understanding it: the work does not ask us to want less, but to allow ourselves to be more. By treating professional identity as costume rather than character, The____Resume separates what someone does from the entirety of who they are, challenging the increasingly blurred boundary between the individual and the résumé, title, or LinkedIn profile used to represent them. Even the collection’s name carries that idea. The blank in The____Resume is intentional, left open for the viewer to complete with whatever they choose to place there. In doing so, Jiayi turns the title back toward its audience with a final question: What does your résumé say about you—and, more importantly, does it have to?
Process Portfolio Page
Introduce The____Resume as a fashion collection before discussing its conceptual development. Describe the collection’s visual language, including silhouettes, tailoring, fabrication, styling, construction, recurring motifs, and overall atmosphere. Explain how the garments embody the fictional corporate characters that inspired the project, and how the collection visualizes themes of productivity, performance, ambition, and contemporary professional identity. This section should allow readers to immediately picture the collection before learning how it was developed.
Behind that premise was an equally significant shift in Jiayi’s creative process. In earlier projects, research served to construct fictional worlds in which garments could exist. This time, however, the process began with people. Jiayi first developed independent fictional characters, each with a distinct psychological relationship to work, ambition, and professional performance, before designing the clothing that would communicate those identities. The idea itself gradually emerged through observation. After reading Alex McCann’s essay The Death of the Corporate Job, the designer began noticing similar conversations everywhere—from friends working across entirely different industries to the increasingly performative culture surrounding LinkedIn, where appearing productive often seemed as important as productivity itself. Online memes, reels, and satirical commentary surrounding hustle culture further revealed that these anxieties were widely shared rather than isolated experiences. “When enough people recognize the same joke,” Jiayi reflects, “it becomes its own form of social commentary.” Looking back, the designer sees this project as the moment her philosophy shifted from designing “inside out”—starting with personal aesthetic interests—to designing “outside in,” beginning instead with collective experiences and translating them into fashion. The garments no longer illustrate a visual theme; they give form to emotions and social conditions that already exist around us.
Video, Models: Clare McMahon, Anastasya Vlasenko, Kara Best, Helen He, Jenny Qiu
That conceptual maturity has already begun attracting recognition beyond the university environment. During the final presentation of the collection, one professor praised The____Resume as a compelling example of how humor could become a powerful conceptual strategy without sacrificing intellectual depth, reinforcing Jiayi’s belief that satire can be just as meaningful a foundation for fashion as solemnity. The collection continued to resonate after graduation, with stylists requesting pieces for editorial pulls and introducing the work to audiences outside academia. Perhaps the most unexpected milestone came when Jiayi received an inquiry from the team of an Academy Award–nominated costume designer requesting garments from the collection to dress musician Tierra Whack during a BET tribute performance honoring Lauryn Hill. For an emerging designer, the experience confirmed that the collection had developed a life beyond the classroom, communicating with people who had encountered neither the research nor the educational process behind it.
Professional experience has likewise shaped Jiayi’s perspective on fashion. After becoming a finalist in an upcycling competition, the designer joined Tory Burch as an intern, gaining firsthand experience within one of the industry’s leading fashion houses. While the internship provided invaluable insight into the collaborative realities of commercial design, it also revealed how creativity inevitably exists alongside practical constraints. Recognizing that The____Resume might represent the final opportunity for complete creative freedom before entering the professional industry, Jiayi approached the collection with unusual honesty, allowing every design decision to emerge from genuine observation rather than commercial expectation. That urgency became one of the project’s defining qualities, transforming it into a deeply personal statement about work, identity, and contemporary culture while simultaneously demonstrating the technical sophistication expected of an emerging fashion designer.
Video, Music Production: Minsung Kwon
Looking ahead, Jiayi sees The____Resume not as the conclusion of a chapter, but as the beginning of a long-term design methodology. Future collections will continue to start with people rather than aesthetics, using fictional characters to explore the emotional contradictions embedded within everyday life. While contemporary work culture provided the foundation for this collection, the designer believes similar tensions exist throughout modern society—in the spaces between expectation and lived experience, public identity and private emotion. Reflecting on her own creative journey, Jiayi is most surprised not by technical growth, but by discovering that her strongest work emerged from uncertainty rather than confidence. “I realized that design isn’t primarily a visual discipline,” she says. “It’s an observational one. You have to notice something real before you can make something meaningful.” That perspective may ultimately define Jiayi’s practice more than any individual collection Rather than asking audiences simply to admire her garments, Jiayi invites them to recognize themselves within the characters who wear them. In The____Resume, even the blank becomes an invitation: to reconsider how much of ourselves we place in the titles we carry, and how much remains when those titles are taken away.
In partnership with APG
You can view the original article HERE.
