Uyen Nguyen

Designers

Uyen Nguyen

Biography

I am a New York City based artist and aspiring fashion designer. The fashion which I find most exciting, both in terms of my personal attire and avant garde runway looks, is that which can be considered art. From something as simple as a graphic tee with a compelling print to an elaborate garment with sculptural qualities, I am most drawn to clothing items that can function as wearable art. My personal fashion is a means of self expression and a statement on the type of art I enjoy. My aesthetic is very bold. I have an obsession for bright, fully saturated colors and I love experimenting with materials that have unique color properties, like birefringence. My style is at times ostentatious but I try to implement my over-the-top aesthetic tastefully. As an artist, I primarily create origami sculptures. As a designer, my goal is to translate my art into something functional by making it wearable. I created the brand WINWIN (the phonetic spelling of how to pronounce my name) to present my fully developed and realized products to the world. Most of my designs are still concepts under development, including the works in this submission which are prototypes that still require testing for functionality and durability before producing for market. I like to have fun with prototyping, for it is where I experiment with new construction techniques and different materials to fine tune my fabrication processes before moving to production.

Looks

Image for look '[Fibonacci Series] STEM Skirt' — Photo: Uyen Nguyen Model: Elizabeth Kilson

About the look

[Fibonacci Series] STEM Skirt

vinyl bonded to polyester faille, brass grommets, satin ribbon

2019

The STEM and Leaf Skirts are both part of my Fibonacci Series - a collection of garments based on the Fibonacci sequence. The STEM skirt is named partially as a nod to my background as an engineer. I first started developing the skirt while at Cornell University where Bin Liu, came up with a design for a radial Miura-ori pattern with a planar profile. I created a design similar to his but used the Fibonacci sequence to determine the spacing and create a conical profile so it could be used as a skirt. I created the first iteration of this skirt for VOGEL’s Spring/Summer 2016 collection, which debuted at Vancouver Fashion Week. For this particular iteration of the skirt, I redesigned the crease pattern so that the structure would be cylindrically flat-foldable. The skirt has 16-fold rotational symmetry and alternating panels are colored black and yellow to give it a lenticular effect. Despite the even distribution of both colors, the left half of the skirt will always look black and the right half will always look yellow. In the theoretical model, as you rotate the skirt, the yellow panels are hidden to expose more black panels (or vice versa) but due to the rotational symmetry, the appearance of the skirt remains the same. However, when worn by a human, because a person’s waist isn’t perfectly circular and more elliptical, different viewing angles can change the proportion of black and yellow visible. The graphic t-shirt that shows an aerial view of the skirt design.

Image for look '[Fibonacci Series] Leaf Skirt' — Photo: Uyen Nguyen Model: Elizabeth Kilson

About the look

[Fibonacci Series] Leaf Skirt

vinyl bonded to polyester crepe de chine, metal snaps, elastic

2019

The STEM and Leaf Skirts are both part of my Fibonacci Series - a collection of garments based on the Fibonacci sequence. (As you travel from the waist to the hem, the spacing of each of the segments follows 1, 1, 2, 3, 5…) The Leaf Skirt has 8-fold rotational and mirror symmetry. I designed this skirt to be as 3D and spiky as possible, therefore it is not flat-foldable, even though it shares a lot of design elements with the STEM skirt. It is paired with a shirt whose central graphic contains part of the crease pattern for the skirt design and is made from the negative space removed when creating the skirt. The sleeves also use the same pattern as the skirt but are constrained in a different way.