This Year of the Mouse, Disney x elly presents The Mouse of the Year.
Our Inspiration
Part 1 - The Year of the Mouse
What a year it has been! We’ve had so many firsts this year – we started 2019 with our largest CNY collection ever. We expanded our range of personalisation services, launched our new personalised baby gift sets in luxury turquoise boxes and we held our biggest clearance sale event held outside our store for the first time! We are so proud of all the new things we brought to you this year. Looking further back, it has been an amazing journey over the last seven years.
CNY2012 was when we launched our first collection of comfortable cotton cheongsams for children with fabrics from the US, Europe and Japan. The following year, we started designing our own CNY fabrics instead and we have never looked back. In the last seven years, we’ve designed unique collections every year, each time bringing you something new. We've had geometrics, scattered all-over prints, Japanese fans, animals (actually, lots of animals like horses, puppies, fishes and ducks!), and CNY icons such as Chinese knots (2018), gold foil gingkos (2017), cranes (2019), lanterns (2015/2019) and blooms (2016). It has been both fun and challenging to think of something new year after year.
Something More
The Year of the Mouse is symbolic as the start of a new zodiac cycle, so we saw CNY2020 as an opportunity to design something more, and something different from our previous scattered placement prints. Compared to seven years ago when we were one of the first in the market, today our customers have more choices, which puts the onus on us to keep pushing ourselves to explore and experiment to differentiate ourselves. So this year we have taken yet another bold step.
Elly’s CNY2020 is all about the details - the beauty of the artwork of the print and the detailed trims we use. We believe beautiful artwork shouldn’t be reserved just for adult clothing, and children’s clothing can also feature beautiful artwork prints. This Year of the Mouse, our design team focused on the beauty and intricacy of the traditional artwork in our designs. We turned to our own Chinese and Peranakan roots for inspiration by looking back to the familiar sights we grew up with in Grandma’s house. Inspired by vases at Grandma’s home and kebayas worn by our Grandma, we translated these styles of motifs into herons, kites and butterflies.
The Zodiac Kites
See if you can spot all the animals from the zodiac calendar on the kites the children are flying! Our Zodiac Kite print kicks off the new zodiac cycle. For the first time, we are using detailed fine art drawings in our clothing, drawn to look like the artwork on porcelain vases. It wasn’t easy to print them. Designed deliberately in two everyday colours, this is a print that can be worn long after CNY.
The Herons and The Butterfly Kites
Heron Print and Butterfly Kite Print – Both these prints were inspired by the type of art on the sarong kebayas Grandma used to wear – from the grand to the simple. You can see again the intricacy of our art this year in the precise art-drawn herons in our Heron Print.
The Butterfly Kites are also drawn in the same art style! We’ve received requests to design a Peranakan and batik collection over the past few years. For children though, it’s not as easy as getting batik fabric to make a cheongsam. We chose to take the art style and create a more accessible print for children.
Our new teal and pink butterfly kites twinning sets also offer pastel options which work throughout the year.
Elly CNY 2020 Part One – The Year of the Mouse - brings you six prints and 40 pieces!
Part 2 - The Mouse of the Year
While we were in the midst of completing our CNY 2020 designs, we were presented with the opportunity of a lifetime – to design a brand new CNY collection specially for The Year of The Mouse. Yes, you guessed it. With none other than the world’s most famous mouse.
Who could say no to the chance to design a CNY collection with Disney’s Mickey Mouse in The Year of The Mouse?
If you’ve been following our personal social media accounts, or if you’ve ever been lucky (or unlucky) to even mention Disney to me in passing, you would know exactly what a huge Disney fan I have been for as long as I can remember. (Ask me about my honeymoon story and the escape to Walt Disney World from Italy and being interrogated in immigration for two hours, or about my 21st birthday surprise trip to Disney World!) Disney for me has been all about a world of fantasy, magic, wonder and dreams ever since I was a child.
But despite being huge fans, it wasn’t an easy decision. We first spent another month redrawing part of our original CNY collection. We needed to know we could design a Disney collection within our elly story – hold true to the world’s most iconic Mouse and keep the essence of our brand after 8 years. We needed to know that it wouldn’t consume who we were first and foremost as a Singapore brand. I’m glad to say that we ultimately did find that magic balance.
By the time our design process was completed, we had designed a combination of Hidden Mickeys and true Mickey style prints to celebrate the Year of the Mouse. We stayed true with our original CNY theme with 6 prints – Peranakan, Batik and intricate motifs - and added 11 more prints. To tell the Mickey story through the eyes of Elly, we re-visited familiar themes from our past collections and re-created them especially for the Year of the Mouse.
The first and most iconic print is Gingko Mickey – inspired by our CNY2017 collection. Mickey’s silhouette is specially designed to blend in with the Gingko leaves to create the Hidden Mickey effect! Gingko Mickey comes in two colours – peach with red Mickeys and a new shade of blue with coral Mickeys.
Inspired by our CNY2016 Blooms and Brollies collection, my personal favourite is Fanfare Mickey - with floral blooms and fans, it is a classic oriental print combining fans with pink flowers. A simple and pretty design, yet elaborate and intricate at the same time, with the iconic Mickey hidden within the motif! This will be available in two colours – blue fanfare and peach fanfare.
Inspired by this year’s Part One Year of the Mouse collection is Mosaic Mickey (also available in two colours – yellow and pink). Here, we used Peranakan tiles as a motif. (P.S. you really have to look hard to see the Hidden Mickeys in this print, but once you see it, you can’t un-see it!).
Why Hidden Mickeys? Fans of Disney parks will know that you can find hidden mickeys in the most unlikely places throughout Disneyland. You can go on your own scavenger hunt to find Mickeys in the most surprising places! We thought this would be a fitting tribute to Mickey where he could turn up hidden in some of our prints!
But it’s not all about Hidden Mickeys. What’s the Year of the Mouse without truly celebrating the world’s most iconic mouse right? We bring you Lantern Mickeys and Red Stripe Mickeys. These prints will help you celebrate CNY with the famous mouse himself front and centre. When we designed these prints, we also wanted something you can gift throughout the year to other Mickey-loving friends, children visiting Disneyland or babies born in the Year of the Mouse. You can even bring a part of Singapore overseas as a gift!
With our range of Disney x elly prints for this year's cheongsams and shirts, we give everyone the chance to choose from the subtle to the iconic, to match whatever your personal style.
Our Casual Collection
Our last two prints are part of our casual collection! Our casual collections have now become an integral part of our CNY collections because many of our customers like to use them for day 2 or day 3 of visiting, so we have expanded this range. Along with different prints, you’ll find casual styles in the earlier nine prints to wear on the other fourteen days of CNY.
Springtime Mickey brings to you bright colours and flowers to signify the beginning of Spring this Year of the Mouse!
We’ve created new shapes for moms – kimonos, camisole tops and a mandarin-collared blouse so you can buy timeless pieces which will go beyond CNY.
For the final print, we revisit stripes from our previous CNY collections with a touch of playful Mickey and Minnie.
If you’ve tried on our jersey cottons, you’ll know how soft and stretchy they are. Choosing fabrics is at the heart of our design process and this year is no different. You really have to touch it to feel the difference.
New Buttons
Beyond the art in our prints, in each of these cheongsams, you’ll find something even more intricate this year. On top of our signature round jade buttons, you can find jade coins, and flower buttons in three colours. This goes beyond the print to add something pretty, and different in our collection.
Six new colours of shorts
Of course, not forgetting new colours of our ever-popular boys shorts to match with our entire collection – salmon, sea blue, cream, grey and bright red, and a special glow-in-the-dark shorts from our Disney x elly collection. Kids are going to have so much fun going to the movies with the glow-in-the-dark prints! These shorts colours are specially chosen to match with all the colours of our shirts this year so you can easily find something to match.
Lux collection
We have also brought back our lux collection in two new laces. The wonderful part about our lace is that we select them carefully to match the colours of our collection. Look closely and you’ll see that the two-tone pink and blue lace matches Zodiac Kites in Blue and Pink, Pink Butterfly Kites, Blue Fanfare Mickey and the red lace matches all reds in both parts of our collection.
With grateful hearts at our team for putting together a 100+ piece collection, it has been our privilege to work with Disney to design our most iconic collection of the year. For this Disney fan, it has been truly special.
This Year of the Mouse, Disney x elly presents The Mouse of the Year.
Launching online at 9 a.m., 26th Dec 2019.
UPDATED on 23 Dec 2019 ->> Do note our Launch Event is on hold for now. We will provide more information at a later date.
UPDATED on 31 Dec 2019 ->> Join us for our launch event at Coleman Room, Lv 4 Four Points by Sheraton on 4th & 5th January 2020!
Venue: Coleman Room, Lv4 Four Points by Sheraton, 382 Havelock Road S169629
Dates: 4th Jan 2020 (9am to 7pm) 5th Jan 2020 (10am to 6pm)
x, Audrey
(Photo credit: Maryann from The Studio Loft who always captures our shoots just the way we imagine them to be!)
