"Pathological Love" in Every Stitch: An Interview with HKDI Brother Creative Embroidery Award Winner YUEN Wing Ki

For the third consecutive year, Brother has sponsored the HKDI Fashion Design Graduation Show, demonstrating our ongoing commitment to supporting and nurturing local emerging fashion designers, and promoting the diverse development of embroidery in the fashion industry. This year, we proudly introduced the "Brother Creative Embroidery Award," and the winner is the incredibly talented graduate, YUEN Wing Ki.

Her award-winning collection, "PATHOLOGICAL LOVE," translates complex and extreme psychological states into tangible garments, with the art of embroidery playing a crucial, finishing role. We invited Wing Ki to share her emotionally charged creative journey with us.

To materialize this abstract emotional metaphor, Wing Ki chose to deconstruct the traditional silhouettes of suits and wedding dresses. By using layers of heavy, oppressive fabrics, she tells a contradictory story of struggling between love and control, bondage and desire. This was no easy feat. Through countless draping and sampling tests, she continuously fine-tuned the fabric proportions and structures, successfully overcoming the immense challenge of maintaining the garments' overall fluidity and texture to accurately present that suppressed emotion.

The Resonance of Embroidery and Emotion: "Obsession" in Every Stitch

Midway through the creative process, Wing Ki realized her existing design vocabulary wasn't distinct enough. To break the bottleneck, she decisively added hand-drawn patterns and text in the later stages, combining embroidery with printing techniques. This turning point became the soul of the entire collection.

Initially, she had only planned to use printing techniques, but the physical results were too flat. The addition of embroidery not only solved the issue of lacking a visual focal point, but its unique three-dimensional texture and luster also instantly elevated the collection's visual tension. More importantly, the craft of embroidery shares a profound connection with the theme of "PATHOLOGICAL LOVE":

"The pulling and tangling of the embroidery threads perfectly echo the 'bondage' and 'obsession' emphasized in my work. The process of repeatedly piercing the fabric with a needle and thread is a metaphor for the complex psychology in a pathological relationship—repeatedly hurting each other, yet trying to mend and bind it all together with dense stitches."

Technology Realizing Inspiration: The Precision of the Brother PR1055X

To perfectly present a design so full of emotional tension, professional equipment is an indispensable driving force. For this project, Wing Ki specifically utilized the Brother PR1055X professional embroidery machine to complete the embroidered elements.

She shared, "Compared to domestic models, this professional equipment offers a larger embroidery area, allowing me to complete large-scale embroidery creations efficiently and precisely." With powerful equipment support, Wing Ki was able to translate the complex design concepts in her mind into reality without hesitation, ensuring that viewers are immediately drawn to the embroidered details on the garments.

Words of Encouragement and Future Outlook

Words of Encouragement and Future Outlook

Reflecting on her creative journey, Wing Ki encourages her fellow design students to explore different craftsmanship possibilities. "Brother embroidery machines have a rich built-in library of embroidery effects and stitches, and each effect can bring a completely different visual and emotional vocabulary to a design." As long as you are brave enough to experiment, the machine can absolutely become a great assistant in sparking inspiration.

Looking to the future, Wing Ki states she will continue to use embroidery as a core element and further explore the diverse possibilities that needlework can inspire in fashion design. Once again, congratulations to Wing Ki on her well-deserved "Brother Creative Embroidery Award." We look forward to seeing more of her brilliant masterpieces combining embroidery art and fashion in the future!