Motoguo - At Your Service

Motoguo is the first Southeast Asian label to be shortlisted for the LVMH Prize for young fashion designers and has grown exponentially since its founding. We invite four Singaporean designers to contribute a series of questions to its founders to find answers to the highlights of the founders' creative career.

- Manfred Lu

What does the Southeast Asian design scene look like to you? Now, think about what it looked like in the 1980s, 1970s, and even during the days of Independence. What did it feel like, and perhaps more importantly, what did it stand for? In the decades leading up to Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Jakarta materialising as key markets for international fashion names, it was unmistakable the appeal of local designers embodied the language of fashion. Vintage fashion magazines reveal a co-existence between Western and local labels amongst the editorial shopping pages. Departmental stores such as Yaohan and Tangs filled their concourses with Asian names. It has always been ubiquitously informal, iconoclastic in appeal, a little DIY, and distinctively unique.

Despite being home to the largest luxury titans in the world today, Southeast Asian fashion has resurfaced. It is now defined by an attitude as any formal aesthetic, institution, or vision of luxury would. The label that embodies this is none other than motoguo — a seven-year-old Malaysian brand founded by creative directors Moto Guo and Kinder Eng. Together with business partner Jay Perry Ang, motoguo mastered a language that is universally legible but stands out on its own. The label produces original inventions that unite the adrenaline of youth from multitudes of subcultures that ultimately straddle the boundaries of age, culture, and class, which is rare even from a global standpoint.