by Beth Whelchel, YKK Corporation of America
Bianca Chong is a fashion design student who won the YKK Fastening Award at the International Talent Support 2015 contest in Trieste, Italy. She won this award for her clever use of YKK’s VISLON® flat zipper with a mirror-like finish in designing a leather clutch purse.
Here is what she had to say regarding how she designed this purse.
“A zipper has always been used as a mechanism for opening and closing different applications. I wanted to create a leather clutch in which the zipper is used to not only open the clutch, but also to trigger the motion of different elements within the bag, which will cause the bag’s leather flaps to open on either side.
“Since I did not want the zippers to slide open and distract the audience, I developed my own slider which closes the zipper at both ends as suggested by YKK consultant, Kei Kagami. This slider works like two zipper sliders that are facing each other and attached together.
“To demonstrate the smoothness of the sliding plastic fastener, I used YKK’s plastic VISLON® flat zipper with a mirror-like finish. This zipper also adds a touch of high-end luxury to the bag.”
“I also connected each zipper at the top of the bag to two different size three-D printed discs that I placed at different distances from the center of the bag on each side so that the user can observe a slightly different kind of motion when he or she moves a slider across one of the zippers. When a user moves a slider across a zipper, it will cause one of the discs to make a circular motion in front of one of the flaps and cause the flap to open. I used a circle as the main shape in the components of the bag since it is a closed curve with no ending point, which is coherent with the circular motion it generates. The silhouette of the bag is kept simple so that the audience will focus on the mechanism that the zipper generates.”
In addition to creating the leather clutch purse, Chong also designs jewelry, and she exhibited her collection at the New York Women’s Accessories Show in New York in February, and Teppei Ohashi with YKK’s Global Marketing Group in New York visited her booth at the show.
YKK hopes to continue to build its relationship with this outstanding young designer.
