Picking jewels

Shanghai-born Chinese designer Octavia Yang draws inspiration from her Chinese cultural background in jewelry design, combining and contrasting between the traditional and the modern. Photo provided to China Daily

Chinese designer teams with Swarovski

Crystal-clear vision of jewelry designers

For Kou, also known as button in Chinese, Yang picked the frog button, a style element from 1920s Shanghai. The frog button is also the first button in a qipao. She made the button look like two diamond-shaped frames embellished with colorful Swarovski crystals, as a reflection of the gardens of Suzhou near Shanghai, where windows of people's houses delicately frame the town's views.

"Like a window that frames the view, this is not only a button. It is a gateway to a woman's inner world," Yang says.

The Classic in Joinery collection is a development of Yang's signature joinery work. The collection combines the elegant shape of a peacock's tail with Chinese wood craftsmanship that has been used in architecture and making furniture for thousands of years. Again, Yang took inspiration from the older days of Shanghai and Paris and gave the designs a modern outlook.

Born and raised in Shanghai, Yang had a bachelor's degree in jewelry design in Shanghai before acquiring a master's in fashion artifacts at London College of Fashion, where she was tutored by renowned contemporary designer Naomi Filmer.

In a place far away from home, Yang discovered the value of her own cultural roots as she researched extensively on designers Vivien Westwood and McQueen.

"I realized that many of these designers' early works are based on their cultural backgrounds. As a Chinese, I'm born with a strong sense of Chinese culture that others don't have. So I asked myself why don't I use my own culture? Especially when it has not been used by many people," she says.