“The inflatable-wear is like an agent or catalyst that makes it easier to engage with other people.”

All of us oscillate between wanting to engage with everyone and wanting to retreat to our shells. When Yunpei Li came to London for her MA, she experienced culture shock and  a new set of social norms. That led her to explore inflatable-wear as a source of comfort, safety, and to create a personal space which could be adapted based on how you are feeling.

“The inflatable-wear created a personal space for me in public settings because sometimes I'm very introverted and I want  my privacy. It is really flexible and can switch between the inflated and deflated states which allows me to switch between introverted and extroverted states.”

Yunpei is now pursuing her PhD at London College of Fashion where she’s exploring inflatable-wear as an embodied space. She wants people to use it as a transformative space where they can have a liminal experience and therapeutic performance that allows them to escape social norms and their performative roles and create a new space where they can discover a new version of themselves.

“My participants, the students and staff of London College of Fashion, immersed themselves in the experience and they thought about their childhood. They were really happy and they forgot all the anxieties of their social roles. I think this is a new spatial relation with the space they situated themselves in.”