Can you tell us the story behind Syzygy?

Syzygy is a fashion label co-founded by Yuan Lung Kao and Katrina Yu Wei Lee following their graduation from the Royal College of Art in 2018. We aim to provide modern women with innovative options of interactive clothing combined with architectural silhouettes and creative textiles. We dedicate our aesthetics on multi aspects of fashion.  We have some main aspects that we consider to be innovative: modular system, multiple ways of styling and unique textile development. We focus on texture designing, innovatively developing our own fabrics with specialisation in jacquard knitting techniques. Furthermore, we built a sophisticated modular fashion system by offering exchangeable patterns within garments. Multiple shapes, silhouettes, even functions, could be installed in simple steps. Through the combination of specialised textile design and construction, one garment with infinite possibilities could be achieved delicately and interactive possibilities of fashion design could be enhanced exquisitely.  The conceptual scaffold of Syzygy was gradually constructed during the MA study in the Royal College of Art, and our second season the AW20 collection “Mercury Transit” has been shown in London Fashion Week in February, 2020.

Can you share with us more about the inspirations behind your brand and collections?

For our brand name is Syzygy and it represents the moment when 3 stars align together, we always start our research with correspondent astronomical moments. And in Taiwan’s culture, Syzygy could also mean the wax and wane of the moon. It symbolises the ultimate circulation and it’s a never-ending circle of life. For the theme of our first 2 seasons, Eclipse and Mercury Transit, are all describing the correspondent concept. We enhanced the poetic moments of stars colliding, and at the same time we combined the images with not only our unique textile design but also the core concept of our brand: “One garment, multiple possibilities”.

What about your creative process, how do you start working on a collection?

We usually start our creative process with a lot of research. Once the theme is decided, we would start an exciting journey of concept building, image hunting and silhouette imaging. We would let the concept lead us to story building, and we would start exploring the possibilities of collaging and creating visual in order to have a more clear picture of our mood for the collection. We then start developing textiles, silhouette according to the visuals we have, and that would lead us to the final making of the collection.