Boyu Yan is a Chinese jewelry designer and maker. She is a member of the Art Jewelry Forum and a 2023 Cartier Scholar. She earned her BA in Jewelry Design from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London in 2025, and is currently pursuing an MPS in Fashion Management at Parsons School of Design. With an obsession with reimagining the body, identity, and roles, her work explores the interaction between reality and fantasy.

The brand, Yan Boy, is built on her conviction, “Pockets can be worn as jewelry”. She is frustrated and annoyed every time she finds her pockets are fake or can hold nothing. Inspired by these disappointing but beautiful pockets that people carry every day in life, Boyu starts her ironic journey of representing the pockets by using the chainmail as a glamorous and playful defiant.

“The process of I making the chainmail is much like making a pocket for a garment that is stitched by stitch. I start from 0, and use this slow process to against the phenomenon of women’s pockets being cut due to its cost and being considered ‘useless‘ in the mass fashion production. I seen every jump ring as my stitch, and chainmail as my cloth. My protest is beautiful and complaint, but in the end, all of the complains will be squeezed in a useless, beautiful, surface figure that sometimes appearing on the clothing….and, that is it.”