YVMIN’s jewelry is addressed by the coexistence between myth and function taken by fragile fantasies of pure femininity. They’re known for silver butterfly motifs, jewel adorned frames, all understood by a clean ethereal aesthetic. YVMIN’s pieces have been sported by starlets like Billie Eilish, Bella Hadid & Taeyeon; as the brand snowballs in reputation, the essence isn’t lost as they continue to challenge conventions of jewelry alas the custom YVMIN leg prosthetic shell made for Xiao Yang in 2021.

Their newest collection, ‘Cat Toy’, rolls off of the Osami Dazai novel, ‘⼥⽣徒‘ to celebrate the delicacy of womanhood with feline emblems. This is accompanied by a collection of home decor items like mirrors and soap sculptures. We had the honor to talk to the duo behind YVMIN about their recent inspirations and future endeavors.

Your latest Spring Summer 2022 Collection, 'Cat toy' is inspired by Osamu Dazai's novel, ‘⼥⽣图'. What drew you guys to this theme?

There we have a hidden story of this series: In April 2021, Our 15-year-old cat who company with us the longest time was passed away. She accompanied me through many things, so I hid her in the “Cat toy" series, those cats of our products comes from her image. Also I decided to gain insight into growth from the perspective of a cat, which is also to commemorate those swaying consciousness and constantly improving self. "It" describes the delicate heart of women as well, so we borrows the name of the novel for this collection.

How did you envision your brand together during your final year at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing? Has it changed at all?

Actually, in the last year of school, we have no plan to create a brand. Xiaoyu and I established yümin studio after graduation, and established the YVMIN brand in 2015. In the studio stage, we mainly do some design projects and the creation of personal art jewelry works, and also make some jewelry series from time to time. After that, we accumulated more and more series and started to cooperate with stores. Initially, our idea for the YVMIN brand was to explore the possibility of contemporary jewelry, hoping that our jewelry would have more interesting things besides the craft materials and wearing methods of traditional jewelry. There have been no changes from the original idea until now.

Are there any favorite pieces or projects you've made that's especially significant in terms of sentimental value and your history as young designers?

Yes, there are several pieces and projects that mean a lot to me, such as jewelry glasses frames, it is a representative piece of our experiment with the way of wearing. If not this start, it will not have following multiple projects including prosthetics. There is also the ripple necklace in the form of fuzzy shape jewelry, with which we found a design language that can represent the concept of the brand: making a profound moment into a real jewelry. Recently, the project that I really want to invest in is the prosthesis made for Xiao Yang. The prosthesis has brought a huge change to her life, which makes me intuitively realize the value brought by design.

Yvmin famously created leg prosthetic adornments for Chinese influencer Xiao Yang late last year, where do you see the future of merging jewelry and prosthetics?

I think there has always been an unmet need for custom prosthetics, and jeweled prosthetics are just one form of that. Prosthetics leave a great deal of freedom in jewelry design. We will continue to design jewelry prosthetics, which are convenient for daily wear, light, comfortable, and provide more choices for prosthetic wearers.

Jewelry acting as emblems and extensions of our bodies is clearly important to Yvmin’s brand ethos; how do you guys discern the functionality and aesthetics of jewelry and clothing?

For us, there is not much difference between jewelry and clothing in essence. They are both a symbol for us to express ourselves, but clothing needs to meet more needs for people, and people has stricter requirements for clothing, while jewelry is more tolerant, and easy to accept some rare designs, which makes jewelry design more freedom.

Between big names such as Billie Eilish, Bella Hadid, and Taeyeon already sporting your pieces, where does Yvmin want to be taken in the near and far future?

We will expand more categories in the future, such as bags and maybe clothing. We will maintain the spirit of exploration and experimentation in the design of these categories as we always did before.