For Yeohlee Teng, design is universal. She believes that design comes from servicing a function and is refined through time and process. Her designs are driven by material, maximizing the use of each fabric by consideration weight, texture, color, and finishing. Yeohlee Teng moved to New York from Malaysia to study fashion at the Parsons School of Design. She has worked primarily in New York City and established her own house, YEOHLEE Inc. in 1981. 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. Yeohlee's designs have earned a permanent place in the Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the late Richard Martin, then Chief Curator, called her "one of the most ingenious makers of clothing today." Richard Flood, Chief Curator of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, extrapolates, "manages to synthesize style into a poetry about the possibility of fabric...The lines are clean and contemporary; the garments are made to animate - not freeze - the wearer."