From My Wardrobe: Yoyo Sham
Defying industry norms, Yoyo Sham considers white shirts and comfort in being
Here’s a game for you. Enter a keyword into your search engine, select the ‘Image’ function. Then switch off your Wi-Fi or internet data. Likely only the first few images will be fully loaded. Scroll down with your mouse, and a palette of colours jostles into view.
In Search of Main Colour Palette
Our keyword search today is Yoyo Sham.
Here are the results – a colour wheel of white, black, beige, grey (in varying tones), khaki, and the occasional light blue, burgundy, dark green.
Is this a glimpse into the colours that make up Yoyo’s wardrobe?
A Performer’s ‘Uniform’
As a young singer in a children’s choir, Yoyo’s concept of performance attire never went further than her two choir uniforms. As a backing vocalist, she opted for an all-black ensemble (her precious collection of concert crew tees remains her first choice homewear). In the early days of her musical career with simple live house shows, Yoyo would wear one outfit for the entire performance. To this day, Yoyo prefers to minimise her costume changes. That way she could focus solely on her music.
That idea of her self-prescribed ‘performance uniforms’ stemmed from her youth. With her height, long white shirts became her signature look and uniform. ‘A professional chef prepares with meticulous care the food to be served, and at the end of their service, they come out of the kitchen to greet their guests in their crisp sharp white uniform. I am the chef, music is the spiritual food I prepare.’
The Boundaries of Ease
For the interview with CHAT, Yoyo brought with her three of her iconic long shirts. True to her pragmatic sensibilities, she pairs them with the same long black trousers and black leather shoes; no fuss, no worries.
‘They may look similar, but to me, these three garments mark the minute transformations I’ve experienced.’ Encouraged by her Taiwanese stylist friend, Yoyo began her foray into more colourful clothing. From garments that are more rigid and stiff – which she thought might give her a strong stage presence as a performer – she has since come to terms with embracing softer textures and silhouettes, as she settles into her performances like a second skin, even for big stadium productions.
Describing her personal style in one word, Yoyo unabashedly says, ‘laziness’. Yet permeating throughout the course of the interview is that feeling of being untethered, unconstrained, fully herself. From a brazen sense of defiance in her youth, countering the sultry extravagance of the industry with sandals and flipflops – the picture of effortless ease, she now entrusts her wardrobe to her team for the delivery of a well-rounded show, considering the role clothing has in the performance for her audiences as well.
Kasaya and the Soul of the Matter
Yoyo Sham has a light yet penetrating musicality, with an honesty and charming disregard that suffuse her personality, work, speech, even wardrobe. Just like the kind of surrender and impermanence captured in her song ‘Born on 00.00.00’, with lyrics by Chow Yiu Fai:
stand as you are in this world
with nothing but my bare bones
donning my heavily patterned kasaya
I long to meet one who will
bend to cut my dark hair
(translated from the original)
隨便在世界到處也站立
寧願用一身筋骨作收納
穿得到花花碌碌的袈裟
一個人就是為著遇到人
彎腰剪我黑髮
Kasaya (or jiasha) are robes traditionally worn by Buddhist monks and nuns. Made with scraps cut from a full bolt of fabric, it is patchworked and resembles rice paddy fields. Not only does the patchworked garment works as protection against theft, it also symbolises the wearer renouncing worldly things like clothing, in the same way hair would be cut and shorn.
In all of Yoyo’s philosophy of ‘being’, she relents and compromises with her team while staying true to herself. The incomplete blocks generated in the keyword search are all her own – a symphonic patchwork of the colours she has embraced, a lush soulful field ready for harvest for her and all those who hear her music.
From My Wardrobe invites celebrity guests to share their thoughts on the clothes that mean the most to them.
Translated by: Grace Wong
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