A Jester's Act

Two years after she won the Men's Folio Designer of the Year 2021 competition, Miao is back with a new collection that captures and preserves fashion as a platform for social commentary - the designer explains how clothes can construct a sentence that speaks louder than words.

- Manfred Lu

It has been almost two years since you won the Men’s Folio Singapore Designer of the Year competition. Take us through your new collection, what inspired you this time? 

My graduate collection is titled “A Jester’s Act” and I was inspired by clowns, jesters, oddities and carnivalesque characters this time. It’s fuelled by the excess materialism held by the upper classes of society and explores the inequality of the world — more specifically the era where we are witnessing the full effects of climate change and fighting against capitalist order. I also used humour for playful juxtaposition between the light and dark themes explored.

I was first heavily inspired by the medieval jester, who could freely speak his mind without worrying about the consequences and whose role was not only to entertain, but to serve as advisor to the king or queen of those times. And from there, I went down the rabbit hole and discovered that there are three distinctive types of clowns in the circus — mainly the Whiteface who holds the highest hierarchy and is usually the leader, the Auguste which usually accompanies the Whiteface and lastly the Tramp clown, who was inspired by homeless people in the 19th century, who is the receiver of the other clowns’ comic doings. These three archetypes of clowns are very reflective of class distinction in modern society, therefore I’ve decided to divide my collection into three couples to represent each of these archetypes.

This is an even larger collection. What was the process like?