Yeohlee Teng was born in 1955 in Penang, Malaysia, to a family of Teochew Chinese descent. She studied at Parsons School of Design in New York, graduated in 1977, and launched her eponymous label in 1981 from a Garment District loft. She has operated from approximately the same block since.

The Method

Teng's technical argument is that the traditional couture pattern-cut wastes between fifteen and thirty percent of the fabric it is cut from. Her own patterns are designed — mathematically, in conjunction with a pattern-maker she has worked with for thirty years — to use 100% of the fabric. The geometric cuts, rhomboid seams, and folded-rather-than-hemmed edges of her garments are consequences of this discipline.

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I do not design dresses. I design geometries. — Yeohlee Teng

The Institutions

Her work has been held by MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cooper Hewitt, FIT, and the V&A. The Museum at FIT's 2003 retrospective YEOHLEE: Work was the first solo exhibition the museum had mounted for a living independent New York designer. She remains one of the very few Asian-American designers of her generation whose work is regularly acquired, as fashion and as design object, by American design museums.

The Sustained Practice

Teng has refused, across four decades, to license, to outsource, or to scale her operation. The label produces, at peak, approximately six hundred garments per season; each is assembled in her Garment District studio. She continues to present in New York during Fashion Week. She is sixty-nine at the time of writing.