Yeohlee practices sustainable[4] and universal design. She uses zero waste methods to create multi-functional garments. Yeohlee believes that "clothes have magic." She dresses the "urban nomad", a term she coined for her Fall 1997 collection, defining a lifestyle that requires clothing that works on a variety of practical and psychological levels. She is a master of design management and believes in the efficiency of year-round, seasonless clothes.[5]
Andrew Bolton, curator of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, stated that Yeohlee shares the vision of the Victoria and Albert Museum founders to both promote and further the use of newly developed processes within the field. On her views on decoration, Bolton stated that Yeohlee views ornament as intrinsic to their construction and as acceptable only when justified by construction, lending her dresses distinction and refinement while empowering the wearer and facilitating movement.[6]
Yeohlee published YEOHLEE: WORK in 2003, which surveys the 20 years of her practice with essays by prominent fashion, art and design curators and critics.[7]
Yeohlee spearheaded the Made in Midtown[8] project as General Secretary on the board of the Council of Fashion Designers of America and in partnership with the Design Trust for Public Space[9] and Making Midtown YEOHLEE’s collections are designed, developed and produced in New York’s Garment District. Today the store and workroom is located at 12 West 29th Street in the NoMad/ Flatiron District. Yeohlee Teng is on the board of the Municipal Art Society of New York.
Her clothing designs have been creative and unusual right from the beginning of her career in the early 1980s. She believes that clothing is an intimate form of architecture. She has established her name for strong geometric designs and concise functualism.[10]
Exhibitions of her designs have been held for more than 40 years now. Yeohlee's work, often described as "architectural," attracted the attention of critics and professionals in other fields of design. To an extent unusual for fashion designers, her clothes were exhibited as design art in many museums and galleries in the 1990s and early 2000s. Her participation in the group show Intimate Architecture: Contemporary Clothing Design, presented at the Hayden Gallery at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982, won a great deal of favorable attention for her work and was an important factor in the early success of her company.[11] Quoted in the New York Times, designer Issey Miyake said Yeohlee's exhibit "proves that fashion no longer has to be separated from the other design fields. At its best, it is considerably more than a craft. It must represent its time. That M.I.T. has staged this show validates fashion and may inspire students here not to become electrical engineers but engineers of fashion.''[12]
Energetics: Clothes and Enclosures, Aedes East Gallery, Berlin, May 22 - June 19, 1998 and the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam, August 1 - September 6, 1999
Cubism and Fashion, Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, December 10, 1998 - March 14, 1999
Chou, Jerome, ed. Making Midtown: A New Vision for a 21st Century Garment District in New York City. Design Trust for Public Space, 2012.
Khoo Salma Nasution, Alison Hayes & Sehra Yeap Zimbulis: Giving Our Best: The Story of St George's Girls' School, Penang, 1885-2010, Areca Books, 2010.
Major, John, ed. YEOHLEE: WORK. Australia: The Images Publishing Group Pty Ltd, 2003.
