Hidden Forces

Few are shaking up Singapore’s fashion climate — but a new breed of local, underground designers has taken the matter into their own hands. We give you the lowdown on those elusive names and the stories behind what they do.

- Allysha Nila

Wai Yang The collections of Myanmar-born designer Wai Wai are created entirely by herself at her home in Singapore, making her one of few designers who directly work on the garment at every step of the creation process — her pieces are only available for pre-order as a consequence. Wai has accustomed herself to such intensity. She trained with London avant-garde designer, Faustine Steinmetz, while studying Fashion Textiles (specialising in printmaking) at London College of Fashion. “Steinmetz started out in a very small studio and she was willing to teach me. It involved doing a lot of time-consuming tasks: setting up weaving machines alone can take up three hours, deconstructing yarn had to be done by picking apart individual strands… A garment took almost a month to create.”

Through experiences, Wai’s work has developed complexity. The collection Patches of Memory, for example, showcases how structure, colour and texture come together to create a sense of déjà vu, which she felt strongly during her first trip to Prague.

“I’m interested in the play of materials and, as a result, illusions — as in when you look closer at something, it’s not what you think it is.” Instead of traditionally drawing her prints, she directly scanned flattened trash (corrugated cardboard, scrap metal, paper) before abstracting them into what we see on the fabric. Because of this dedication to process, Wai says she prefers to be recognised as a textile designer and not a fashion designer – “because there’s so many of them out there”.

You can count on her to deliver something fresh, given her technical prowess. “With printmaking, you can be very experimental. Although there are recipes to create certain pigments, you can invent your own ways of doing it, too.”

Alchemist