Coco Yang
Phygital
Bio
Yujia Yang is a fashion designer from Shanghai, China, who graduated from the Fashion Design Program at Parsons School of Design in New York.
Growing up within a traditional Chinese education system, she experienced restraint, pressure, and emotional suffocation, which later became important sources of narrative in her work.
Her design language incorporates leather, knitwear, deconstruction, oversized silhouettes, and irregular cutting to explore the tension between the body, emotion, and identity.
Through her designs, Yujia hopes to offer clothing as a form of attitude and self-expression, like armor that protects vulnerability while allowing the wearer to shine with individuality and quiet confidence.
Look 1 explores the feeling of emotional restraint through metal, chain-like lines, and protective structures.
The body is wrapped by curved metallic forms that move around the legs and torso, creating a sense of being held, controlled, and restricted. The sharp contrast between black and gray emphasizes an atmosphere of pressure and silence.
The metal elements symbolize an invisible cage: cold, heavy, and difficult to escape. They become both armor and restraint, protecting the body while also limiting its movement. This look represents the first stage of the thesis, where the self is trapped under control, pressure, and emotional suppression.
Look 2 focuses on bondage, suffocation, and the psychological weight of being controlled.
Leather is used as the main material to create a rigid, restrictive silhouette. The crossing straps wrap tightly around the upper body, suggesting a body that is bound, compressed, and unable to fully breathe.
The high collar covers the neck and intensifies the feeling of suffocation. The black leather surface carries a sense of coldness, tension, and authority, while the pale gray straps visually emphasize the act of restraint. This look reflects the inner state of being trapped by emotional pressure, family control, and inherited systems of discipline.
The silhouette of a silkworm preparing to become a chrysalis within its cocoon — yet the transformation is arrested, bound tight by emotion and relationship.
The red cords represent the bondage of family of origin and emotional trauma.
The process of breaking free from the cocoon is agony — as if the pure white silk is stained red by the blood of suffering, as though one is tearing apart one's own flesh and reassembling it.
These memories of past trauma wrap around you like rope — binding you, restraining you, tightening around your throat.
The intention is to capture the sensation of unraveling the silk thread — the slow, painful act of pulling free from the cocoon.
The body now carries the soft, downy texture of a moth newly emerged.
The red cords still wind around the figure but they have begun to loosen, slowly slipping downward.
The upper body has started to grow new flesh and bone — rendered in yarn, pure white.
White as a symbol of unblemished newness.
The white wrapping already takes on the shape of a spine — but incomplete.
Not yet solid.
The red sections begin to extend downward, as if the pain has finally been understood, absorbed — and in being absorbed, it surrenders its weight, draping and falling, no longer cinched tight.
A feeling of release. Of slack. Of something finally letting go.
The whole top is all hand made
by Macrame and Machine knitting techniques.
The CoreBreaking from the Cocoon — The Moth Emerges
This is the new form, fully arrived — the body has grown its own hardened skeleton at last.
The red that once signified wound and trauma has merged completely with the white of rebirth — no longer two forces in opposition, but one.
The waist serves as a threshold, a severance point — what belonged to the old self is metabolized, shed, left below.
Through the technique of braiding red and white cotton-linen together into a twisted plait, the piece expresses that the pain has been understood and absorbed — fully integrated into the self of this stage.
The detachable spine structure at the back is the image of strength I have always envisioned for myself — and at the same time, the wings of the moth.
