I was a quiet student. I remember I didn’t want to be friends with anyone when I started college because I had too much to do. But that didn’t last very long. Fashion school was amazing. I really loved studying and it was an amazing time to experiment. I think I honed my aesthetic then. It’s funny; I often feel that my tastes don’t change much at all. I’ve looked at things I’ve done in college and they still feel like me. And I think, “When am I going to change?” But there’ll be these threads that I think of and things that I’ve always been drawn to.
Garment construction is really important to me. I like making things and the processes that come with it. I feed off that. It inspires me creatively. Aesthetics are really important, but the process energizes me. A lot of ideas come out of that. There’s so much potential in the technicalities that you won’t know how things will look like until you play around with them. My aesthetic moves forward when it’s about discovering things that you’d definitely wouldn’t draw on paper. I’m a little bit intuitive in that way.
For my latest collection, I wanted to give sound an image. It started with a fairly abstract idea–trying to find an aesthetic for the concept of silence and noise. It’s a visual of what noisy and silence feels like, conflicting the two elements with a textural element that felt like it had a rawness and looseness to it.
Gravity played a part, too. One of the ideas was allowing the fabric to drape itself, where you can cut into it to create something without cutting a pattern. It’s really about trying to bring in an ease and allowing gravity to do the drape rather than something that feels too laboured or overworked.
—as told to Harper’s BAZAAR Singapore
Text by Gerald Tan
