A Fashion Legacy inherited. A Story Carried Forward.
My father devoted his lifetime to fashion and to the extraordinary silk of Xiangyunsha. Today, I bring this traditional Chinese heritage Gambiered Cantonese silk from our Shunde family atelier, into a new world of contemporary European fashion.
An ancient craft that refuses to be forgotten. Somewhere between heritage and modernity, I fell in love with an extraordinary silk — put my French savoir- faire in its service: made to order, made slowly, made for one woman at a time. To rewrite a new quiet way of seeing luxury.
OUR STORY
The House of YÀNZǏ
For more than forty years, my family has lived in fashion. My father built a fashion house from nothing, a name that grew, across a lifetime, into a legacy in Greater China. I grew up inside it: in the fabric rooms, patterns room, on the shop floor, learning to read a fashion sketch the way other children learn to read a page. It was never only a business. It was our family language.
That language carried me out into the world. I grew up between countries, trained and worked inside Europe's great fashion houses, and later founded my own haute couture label in Hong Kong and Paris. I spent my life learning how luxury is made, and how a modern woman actually wants to wear it.
Late in my father’s life, he turned to xiangyunsha, the Cambiered Shunde heritage silk of the Pearl River delta China, the "soft gold" made by hand, known in textile industry. Of everything he had worked with, this was the one he wanted to pass to me. December, 2025 he was gone, and the atelier he built grew quiet.
So I answered it, in my own way. YÀN ZǏ is born from my father's legacy and made new for Europe. I could never have kept it as the traditional house he knew, and he would not have asked me to, either. Instead I do what my life prepared me for: I take this rare, protected heritage silk, from our family's own atelier, and give it a modern silhouette: quiet, minimalist, long-lasting, made for how we live now. His craft, my hand and vision: one lineage across two worlds.
This is a family business in the purest sense: from father to daughter, from one country to another, and one day from me to my own children. Every piece is made to order, from a silk made only a few months of each year, dyed by hand with wild yam and river mud, cured under open sun, and held by China as national intangible cultural heritage. Nothing is wasted, because this was never about making more. It is about keeping something alive, and passing it on.
YÀN means serene. It is our family name, and it is what this silk is.
Tiphanie Yan
Founder & Designer
Tiphanie Yan was raised in a family of fashion, and has spent her life in the business — across the whole of it. From textiles and design to manufacturing, distribution, sales and management, she came to know a garment end to end, then trained in the most prestige French fashion houses and founded her own haute couture label in Paris and Hong Kong. She built it not on volume, but on made-to-order craftsmanship: patterns cut and made for one woman at a time, for those who ask more of what they wear and understand that a garment is more than something worn : craftsmanship, a relationship, a piece made for her alone, made to last and kept for years, not seasons.
Xiangyunsha silk came later, through her father — his to pass on, hers to carry forward. Her design vision is pared and precise: simplicity, clean and minimal lines, and the luxury that lives in a single well-chosen detail. She designs every piece herself through her French savoir-faire and directs the whole of the creative process, from the raw Shunde silk to the woman who wears it. His craft, her hand and vision.
For her, made to order is the philosophy of her work, not a business model — the way she holds true control over quality, and refuses the waste of mass production. A single piece, meant to last generations, rather than adding to an industry already overcrowding the world. Each one honors the silk’s heritage while speaking to the modern woman.