Fashion designer and Human Ecology alumna Yvonne Schichtel ’21 won the Womenswear category of the Global Design Graduate Show with her collection “Lost and Found.” Schichtel’s collection draws from the history of women’s clothing and aims to question the processes by which gender and its relevant garments are assembled. 

The competition is a collaboration with fashion powerhouse GUCCI and started in 2020 after the COVID-19 pandemic restricted the entry of many fashion graduates into the industry. The show’s second edition saw over 5,000 entries from around the world, including students from leading fashion schools. After making the shortlist, “Lost and Found” received the most votes by industry judges in the Womenswear category. 

In creating her portfolio, Schichtel was inspired to both honor and question the “thing” as a performance of femininity as well as an alternative to industrialized sustainability. Schichtel says jewelry and clothing have historically represented power, as they were often gifted to women by the men who held ownership over them. She was inspired by how women took the wearing of jewelry and other ornaments and made it into a statement. 
 

“I came upon a hypothesis—to wear an object on the body is to embed it with value, thereby elevating the value of the owner,” she said. Among these women is Schichtel’s own grandmother. Her assortment of beads was incorporated as baubles into a black power mesh dress, a piece Schichtel notes as one of her favorites from the collection. The dress is also inspired by the Youth-quake movement of the 1960s, in which standard notions of gender and sexuality were questioned through women’s fashion. 

“Yvonne’s practice is about making sense of chaos, be it the travails of the Youth-quake ingenue or deploying unusual materials and construction technique,” said Van Dyk Lewis, associate professor in the Department of Human Centered Design and Schichtel’s faculty advisor. “Fundamentally she is a designer of objects, with a profound understanding of the human body and most importantly outstanding visually acuity to communicate her ideas. I was not surprised of Yvonne’s win.”

Gender and history are also in a conversation about sustainability and waste, another prominent theme in “Lost and Found.” Schichtel suggests that sustainability in fashion is often pared down to a standard industry practice that does not seek to innovate. In her collection, Schichtel offers a “new view of object” by honoring the ways artists such as her grandmother have naturally reused materials in their work. “Lost and Found” is a tribute to Schichtel's “personal practice and philosophy” of material, in which all objects have an inherent value and “creativity is never a waste.” 
 

The Global Design Graduate Show was especially rewarding to Schichtel because of its emphasis on process and concept rather than just the final project. Through the show, the intimacy and the intent of “Lost and Found” could be conveyed. During her undergraduate tenure at Cornell, Schichtel was a research assistant in the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection (CF+TC) where she “found” and catalogued numerous garments, processed deaccessions, and assisted with exhibition installations.

“Yvonne’s process-oriented method meant that she always approached extant archival materials with a careful, critical, and thoughtful eye,” says CF+TC director and faculty member Denise Nicole Green. “She was fascinated by the potential of discovery in the archive and unearthing the stories of garments and accessories in our collection.”

Schichtel has just completed her time as a visiting student at Parsons Paris, a European branch of the Parsons School of Design, which was facilitated through the HCD alumni network. She plans to return to graduate school in 2022 to pursue a master’s degree in fashion design.