London Craft Week: Yi Crafts, Brides of the Mountains
A bride in Liangshan does not buy her wedding dress, she inherits it. Stitch by stitch, season by season, the hands of her mother and grandmother begin the work sometimes in her childhood, finishing only as she prepares to leave home. By the time she wears it, the garment has accumulated years of biographical attention, intention, and care. This is the revelation at the heart of Brides of the Mountains: Yi People's Wedding Craft Heritage in China, a compelling exhibition at London Craft Week 2026.
Yi women in indigo ceremonial dress walk through the falling mountain snow.
Presented by Yi Crafts in collaboration with Moonland Nuosu and Liuran, the show runs from 12 to 17 May at Fitzrovia Gallery on Whitfield Street, and brings together bridal garments, silver adornment, lacquerware, and ceremonial objects from the Yi ethnic minority of Southwest China, a culture whose relationship to cloth defies the usual categories of fashion or decoration. Across the mountainous regions of Liangshan and Yunnan, the wedding dress functions as archive, protection, and a physical passage of knowledge between women. The embroidery is mnemonic. The silver is not ornament but armour.
A Yi bride steps forward, her embroidered dress and silver adornments carrying tradition into a new life. Photo: cai 蔡青
The exhibition reveals the diversity within this tradition: bold appliqué and heavy metalwork from Liangshan, finer, more intricate needlework from Yunnan. Different villages, different clans, different hands, but a shared conviction that a bride's clothing must do more than cover the body. It must carry her.
Vivid embroidery and silver adornment transform the Yi dress into a living tapestry of heritage.
Three makers anchor the project. Sharma Yoyo, a recognised inheritor of Yi traditional dress and founder of the long-term preservation initiative YiRenZaowu, has spent more than a decade reinvesting in sustainable craft livelihoods in Liangshan. Qu Biaoxiang has brought Yi costume and woven jewellery to audiences from New Delhi to Copenhagen. Li Mengru works simultaneously as craftswoman and educator, systematising the knowledge of Yi embroidery and silverwork so that it can survive her. Guided tours run throughout the week, and on 15 and 16 May the gallery hosts a hands-on Yi embroidery workshop in a rare opportunity to sit with the work rather than simply stand before it.
Yi bridal garments and silver adornments, where cloth and metal become symbols of protection and identity.
Brides of the Mountains is not the only international textile story London Craft Week tells this year. The festival's wider programme stretches from Korean ceramics at the Cultural Centre UK to Singapore's National Heritage Board, from the French Craft Collective to contemporary Italian making at the newly opened Casa Italia, and at the Indonesian Embassy, the batik of artist Lisa King, developed in collaboration with artisans in Indonesia and colour specialists in the UK, and shaped by the memory of her late mother, Farida King. Different traditions, different continents. The world arrives in London this May, packed into objects small enough to hold in two hands.
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Further Information:
London Craft Week takes place throughout the city from 11 - 17 May 2026.
Brides of the Mountains: Yi People's Wedding Craft Heritage in China is on show at Fitzrovia Gallery, 139 Whitfield Street, London W1T 5EN, from 12–17 May, 12:00–18:00 daily.
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Image Credits:
Lead: A Yi bride in silver regalia, where every detail shields, signifies, and remembers.
All images courtesy of Yi Crafts and London Craft Week.