Blooming Fold
Paper-based craft becomes a language of wearable structure. Developed for the closing ceremony of WorldSkills Lyon 2024, Blooming Fold brings geometric assembly, cutwork and folding into dialogue with the moving body. Five costume designs explore how planar materials acquire volume, articulate light and transform through performance.
Concept
Chinese paper-cutting, folded flowers and folding fans provide a repertoire of operations through which flat surfaces become spatial forms. Cutting, creasing, interlocking and layering are translated into garment construction, connecting the scale of handcraft with the proportions of the body and the visibility of the stage.
Across the collection, costume operates as both a wearable object and a moving spatial composition. Modular geometry, floral assemblages and articulated folds organise volume around the performer, while illumination reveals openings and layered surfaces. Blooming Fold describes this unfolding relationship between material, body and light.
Geometric Ballet
A tessellation-based system organises triangular modules into a faceted silhouette. Computational geometry informs their dimensions and distribution, while interlocking connections draw on the logic of mortise-and-tenon joinery. Repeated units establish a spatial rhythm around the body, with angular surfaces registering changes in light and posture.
Butterfly Waltz
Paper-cutting becomes a permeable surface around the body. Magnolia and iris motifs are cut into expansive, wing-like forms, while integrated lighting makes their openings and overlapping layers legible on stage. Movement continually shifts the relationship between ornament, silhouette and shadow, bringing the paired garments into a shared choreography.
Flourishing Bloom
Individually hand-formed paper flowers accumulate across the gown and headpiece, building volume through variations in scale, density and texture. An internal framework supports the floral assemblage, allowing the silhouette to extend beyond the body. The garden becomes a principle of construction, with many discrete elements composing a continuous, sculptural whole.
Blossoms in Folded Paper
Symmetry and repeated folds translate paper-flower craft into an architectural silhouette. A continuously folded headpiece accompanies a gown of interlinked panels, establishing a dialogue between concentrated geometry and an expansive, layered surface. Repetition produces depth and visual rhythm, while the restrained palette foregrounds the relationship between crease, light and volume.
Folding Grace
The folding fan becomes an articulated extension of the body. Bamboo ribs and paper surfaces form a manually operated structure at the back, allowing the wearer to alter the silhouette through opening and closing. Pleated elements of different lengths and widths extend this logic across the garment, connecting sculptural volume with gesture and mechanical movement.
WorldSkills Lyon 2024
Presented at the closing ceremony of the 47th WorldSkills Competition in Lyon in September 2024, Blooming Fold brought the five costume designs into a shared stage composition. Integrated illumination defined cutwork, folds and layered surfaces against the darkened arena, while the performers’ movement revealed changing profiles and spatial relationships. The collection’s material explorations became part of a live choreography of body, structure and light.
Junpeng Liang, 2024
With Yi Xiang and student teams from the China Academy of Art and Donghua University
