By Ethan Hall
Yuma Hsu is an RCA graduate from Taiwan. So far, Hsu has released two collections; the most recent of which is her 2024 Hiver Berserk collection. Her collections are full of tensions, in which she explores the dichotomy through different textiles and construction. Hsu’s first collection, Untrammeled, feels like something the boys in Dead Poet’s Society would grow up to wear in sleazy dive bars. However, her second collection shifted to a more commercial approach and toned down the raw, unadulterated angst of the first collection.
Untrammeled
Yuma Hsu’s Untrammeled collection is a key point to situate her design process. After returning home to Taiwan, due to Covid, she was back living with her family. She described how she “often felt repressed since [she’s] not very good at expressing herself”, when conflicts arose in this period. Channeling this repression creates the “unplanned looseness” that carries Hsu forward in the design process.
The structure of the tailoring process has a duality for Hsu, it is necessary in both ways to frame her garments but to also fight against. The clash in this space “between intuition and freedom meets discipline of tailoring is where I feel my design identity and energy are presented in my process”. Hsu describes how she was “laying out scrap fabrics and vintage pieces” then deconstructing them and letting them guide her hand in design.
Yuma Hsu’s pieces develop their own personality and emotion that translate from this process. Hsu describes this as “a hidden explosive energy beneath” that she has drawn from herself and inspirations from around the world. The designer found solace in slow rock and industrial hard rock such as Nine Inch Nails that communicated these kinds of repressed emotions. After a trip to Berlin, Hsu became enamored with the music, fashion, architecture, culture, and energy of the USSR-era of eastern Berlin. It was the “raw kind of feeling of the music in Eastern Berlin” that truly captured her, which becomes pervasive in the raw, frayed seams and almost brutalist silhouettes.
Yuma Hsu's debut collection, 'Untrammeled,' offers a relaxed approach design, eschewing formal rigidity (Images courtesy of Yuma Hsu)
Despite working under the lens of menswear, Hsu describes her collections as genderless. She does not design with a gender in mind, after which she referred to pictures by Wolfgang Tillman she had used in a mood board for Untrammeled of people in the club, who “are enjoying the music, being comfortable and feel free in themselves”. “It is more about pieces that allow someone to feel free and at ease so they can be at ease with themselves”.
Moving forward, Yuma Hsu’s third collection is looking more towards an experimental collection, withdrawing from the commercial side more. Looking to try and utilize knitwear as a new textile to throw in the cauldron and using its softness juxtaposed with leather to develop the style of her clashing designs.
Yuma Hsu’s designs have a definite, deliberate, authentic style because of how it has truly emerged through her emotions. Her everlasting battle against the framework of fashion design continues and we have much to look forward to as she develops her distinct design style.
Yuma Hsu's latest collection, '2024 Hiver Berserk' investigates and deconstructs archetypes through texture and novelty (Images courtesy of Yuma Hsu)
