This Is Our Youth

The spotlight on Singapore’s models has, although dimmed, never gone out — especially for these new faces who continue to put the nation on fashion’s map.

- Terence Poh

Most who have followed Singapore’s fashion industry through the years would point to the ’80s and ’90s as the heyday for Singaporean models — when women such as Ethel Fong, Hanis Hussey and Huda Ali blossomed on runways and campaigns for legacy fashion houses, carving out a place for our tiny city on the fashion map.

An industry still dominated by Western models made for Western-dominated audiences meant that for brands, engaging models from Asia came with significant financial risks. But cultural shifts of the fashion gaze, which has always looked to novelty and exoticism, might have helped alleviate those concerns. The fact that all this happened before the digital age perhaps enhanced the appeal of these pioneering Asian supermodels.

Such success can perhaps be attributed to unprecedented growth in the Singapore economy during that period, when the nation rose to prominence in global markets as one of the Four Asian Tigers. In 1997, Fashion Connections Singapore (an event that became Singapore Fashion Week in 2001) led plans to make Singapore a fashion hub — “a marketplace for the 400 million people in the countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations,” wrote Suzy Menkes for The New York Times. Stephen Lee, the chairman of the Singapore Trade Development Board at the time, described the three-day event — which included a trade show and a designer contest among Southeast Asian countries — as “a gateway to the burgeoning Asian market.” During the same period, famous French upmarket departmental stores like Printemps and Galeries Lafayette made brief forays into the Singapore fashion market.