Making Her Marx

Mae Tan brings BAZAAR into her family home, where gloss and glamour are underpinned by real emotional resonance.

- Jeffrey Yan

In a sea of beautiful, stylish Instagram It girls, Mae Tan (@marxmae) stands out for the realness she brings to the table. A cursory glance at her social media reveals an aesthetic that’s a far cry from the perfectly lit, artfully (if artificially) posed perfection that saturates our feeds. Instead, Tan leans towards a rawer aesthetic, amplified by her penchant for tomboyish pieces, vintage gear, cult streetwear brands and indie designers on the rise—a reflection of the curatorial eye she honed in her previous role as creative manager for multi-label boutique Surrender. That rawness seeps into our conversations as well: Tan is candid, unfiltered and unvarnished—traits familiar to those who binged last year’s hit Netflix reality show Singapore Social, in which Tan was a central cast member.

When I meet her, fresh from the BAZAAR shoot, she has just changed into a black, oversize Prada Re-Nylon shirt and matching boxer-like shorts. “Now I feel like myself again!” she says, laughing as she settles into a cross-legged position. We’re at the Tan family home, a three-and-a-half-story Peter Tay-designed gem nestled in the quiet, leafy enclave of Bukit Timah. The sleek, supersized Modernist monument is exactly what you’d expect the residence of one of Singapore’s most prominent retail families to be. But within that, Tan has carved out an idiosyncratic space all her own.