At least politically speaking, 2009 has been a pretty surreal year: America’s first black President smokes cigarettes on the White House lawn, NASA found ice on the moon just a few days ago, and perpetually prepubescent Ashlee Simpson somehow gave birth. Perhaps it’s the ever-bizzaro cultural climate that’s causing fashion designers, like rising Chinese star Du Yang, to embrace their more eccentric talents.    
Unlike some of her peers, Du Yang, who graduated last year from Central Saint Martins, gets her potency as a surrealist designer from the cheerful, even comical, approach she brings to a design tradition dominated by the dark and gloomy. Fellow surrealists Junya Watanabe, Rei Kawakubo, Victor & Rolf, and Alexander McQueen tend to concoct ominous and often sinister visions. But Yang’s signature blend of cartoony outlandishness and trompe l’oeil abstraction is more likely to make a person wonder if they dozed off at the computer screen than question the nature of good versus evil. 
     Yang’s latest collection, It is a Dream in Colors, takes inspiration from the designer’s “spiritual journey to India,” which apparently included (if her chunky knit textiles are anything to go by) a surfeit of watermelons, strawberries, eyeglass-wearing gurus, bumblebees, and cornrows (the hairstyle — not the farming technique).