Ying Zhang is a London-based Chinese fashion designer and textile researcher whose practice explores the cultural afterlife of industrial materials. Working between fashion, craft, and material research, she transforms discarded denim yarn into handcrafted textiles and garments that examine memory, labour, and the shifting meanings embedded within production. Raised in Shenzhen, a city shaped by rapid industrialisation and economic expansion, Ying grew up surrounded by the rhythms of manufacturing. Her family’s denim dyeing factory became an early site of observation, where piles of waste yarn, fading indigo, hidden labour, and industrial residue revealed another narrative of fashion—one that exists beyond the finished garment. These overlooked materials continue to form the foundation of her practice. Working primarily with reclaimed denim yarn, Ying reconstructs the woven logic of denim through hand knitting and experimental textile techniques. Her process privileges slowness, repetition, and material sensitivity, allowing irregularity, distortion, and wear to remain visible. Rather than restoring discarded matter, her work embraces transformation, proposing that waste carries not only material value but also cultural memory. Central to Ying’s practice is the notion of discordancy—the subtle shifts that occur as images, materials, and cultures circulate through time. Influenced by weathered denim, torn street posters, fragmented urban surfaces, and the visual language of post-industrial landscapes, she treats fading, layering, and fragmentation as acts of publication: records of movement, translation, and reinterpretation. Garments become sites where information continues to evolve rather than settle into fixed meaning. Describing herself as an affichiste, Ying approaches fashion as a publishing medium capable of documenting social structures through material form. Her practice questions dominant narratives surrounding sustainability by shifting attention from efficiency towards continuity, emotional durability, and care. Instead of seeking perfection, she values traces, ambiguity, and the quiet resilience of materials that have already lived another life. Now based in London, Ying continues to develop a material practice that bridges industrial heritage with contemporary craftsmanship. Through the regeneration of waste denim, she proposes a new language for fashion—one that is rooted in memory, shaped by transformation, and attentive to the overlooked relationships between people, materials, and the systems that produce them.