Marina Yee

Marina Yee names the intermittent fashion practice of the Belgian designer and artist associated with the Antwerp Six. Its first formal commercial structure was Marie, established with Miyoshi Hobo in 1986 and presented during the group’s British Designer Show breakthrough in London. Marie produced seasonal work until 1990, when Yee withdrew from its investor-led framework.

The practice resurfaced through distinct projects instead of a continuous house calendar: a thirty-piece MY presentation in Paris in 1995, freelance and interdisciplinary commissions, and the five-piece M.Y. Project made for Laila Tokio in 2018. These periods were separated by long intervals devoted to private studio work, art and teaching.

In 2021 Yee and archive curator Rafaël Adriaensens established M.Y. Collection, bringing her reconstructed tailoring and limited production into a sustained commercial form. The label remained active through 2025, the year of Yee’s death, while subsequent exhibitions placed her garments, drawings and assemblages within a broader account of Belgian fashion and circular practice.

Marina Yee’s practice began with garments that already carried use, damage and memory. She reconstructed vintage menswear and found textiles through cutting, folding, pinning and repair, preserving frayed edges, chalk traces and unfinished seams as parts of the object. Her term “ready-kapot” described an interest in clothing that could be altered because it was already worn or broken.

Tailoring supplied both material and resistance. Blazers, trench coats, shirts and parkas were turned, opened and rebalanced into asymmetric forms, while later collections used origami-like folds to build volume without accumulating cloth. Indigo, navy, black and white kept attention on proportion, handwork and the tension between sturdy textiles and delicate intervention.

Limited output was integral to this design logic. The practice avoided uninterrupted seasonal expansion, favouring recovered materials, small editions and long development. Its environmental position was expressed through how garments were sourced and remade, not through a separate sustainability programme.