My work is based on how I want to express the experience of my multicultural childhood along with the influence of other cultures, including my own background as Vietnamese, but including others such as Japanese and Korean. Some of the personal beliefs I am exploring include the non-gendering of fashion, sustainability, and liberating fashion as a greater form of art. This all comes together as my way of storytelling these different concepts and backgrounds into a collection. Each of my collections involves a detailed story that draws on different aspects of my own experience, interests, and beliefs. 

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When designing, there is a wide range of concepts I love to explore. I want to challenge aesthetics (such as stereotypical streetwear, basic unisex, pink femininity, and trendy fast-fashion) gender, and capitalism within fashion. I am striving to reach beyond the basic meanings of the above words. I want to create fashion that is elevated beyond trends and introduce new aesthetics to be conveyed in my garments. There is no short label to define my clothing such as streetwear or ultrafeminine but the goal here is to challenge labels with new aesthetics. My garments are meant to be worn and shared by all genders and I strive to challenge the binary categories of fashion so that people may simply wear aesthetic clothing. To challenge fashion and capitalism would also mean considering the ethics of labor and sustainability in the supply chain and result in a new way of producing fashion for the consumer such as slowing down the production of fashion in order to carefully consider every step of designing and producing high-quality clothing.

I’ve primarily sourced my materials from the company Fabscrap to use pre-existing/deadstock fabrics to further manipulate and reuse in order to reduce my waste and give new life to these textiles. I do this through re-dyeing, bleaching, painting, cutting, and other numerous ways of transforming fabrics into new pieces. Reusing existing fabrics allows me to further push my creativity as well as problem-solve the issue of waste management of fashion.

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World history has always been an interesting topic to me and history, in general, is where I mainly base my research. I look at past historical events and therefore, establish a connection on how fashion reacted to those events. This allows me to contextualize present events and connect the importance of the past and how it evolved into our current situations. This is translated into my garments by honoring historical details and then is elevated into a modern context in order to continue to be worn in the present day and into the future. 

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For now, I’m not quite sure where I fit but I know where I want to explore.