Faces to watch

Faces to watch
10 young designers showcase their latest creations to an international audience

Daniel Chong	Designer Nurita Harith	Rizman Ruzaini

Young, talented and ambitious! These best describe the 10 designers who showcased their collections at the Malaysia International Fashion Week 2008 (M-IFW’08) recently.

Each of them told a separate story of a fashion designer’s dream.

Alexandrea Yeo and her model.

Featured at the start of the last day of the fashion week were Winson Tan, Nurita Harith, Rizman Ruzaini, Alexandrea Yeo, Justin Yap, Jimmy Lim, Eleanor Ng, Amir Luqman, Hatta Dolmat and Alwyn C.

That morning, the audience - comprising mostly friends and families - were in awe as the models took to the runway wearing each designer’s creations. As a special treat, Daniel Chong - one of Malaysia’s young talents - made a special appearance.

In different countries with different cultures and ethnicities, fashion can be interpreted through so many ways. It could never be described with only colours and patterns as inspirations are drawn from almost everything in a fashion designer’s lifetime experiences.

The same goes for these 10 up-and-coming fashion designers who showcased a wide array of bizarre and fashionable collections in line with the theme "10 Rising Stars". It was a memorable show that will surely spur them to greater heights in the international platfonm one day.

Daniel Chong and his model

Just before the designers went backstage to celebrate a job well done, I managed to speak to three designers about how they felt about their fashion creations.

Nurita Harith

I started off taking part in competitions, including the Project Runway Malaysia. Since I was very young, I loved drawing female figures due to my fascination with models. I realised later that fashion was a big part of me. Most of my designs are seen in neutral tones, complemented by softness and femininity. My collection, ‘Shades of Grey’ was inspired by my new boutique in Bangsar which I have just given a new coat of paint. Using mostly satin, silk and stretchable fabrics, my dresses are seen in pastel colours. You would notice that it’s a statement of sophistication in a subtle way.

Alexandrea Yeo

Winson Tan and his model.

Androgyny, sexuality, trans-gender and cross-dressing are some of the elements which you would notice in some of my designs. Based on high street ready-to-wear garments, the uniqueness of my collection is communicating masculine women, feminine men, shoulders and sleeves and the colour black. My collection this time around is inspired by an anime character, Mononoke. It tells of a story about escaping reality. Some of the illustrations that are noticeable are ‘how a Japanese brothel is like’, ‘a woman and man’ and ‘sexuality’. I’ve used a lot of embroidery and vibrant colours on black fabric as a canvas (background colour).

Winson Tan

My label started after I won the Most Promising Designer Award last year in the M-IFW’07. You would notice that my designs are more focused. My design process is a mould of intuition, imagination, experimentation and creativity. One obvious thing is that I’m greatly inspired by abstract issues of thoughts, feelings and emotions. The collection which you noticed on the runway this year is inspired by distortion. Distorted silhouettes are reflected through parts of the gowns which are made by Lego pieces. One of the gowns took me two days to complete! Besides the Lego-piece gowns, other colours which I used were black, ash, brown, grey and I even used Lego pieces to build the model’s shoes. However, there’s not much evening wear. My collection is more towards casual wear made of cotton and linen fabrics. Instead of a single element, I combined the avant garde and casual elements into one major element.

Alwyn C	Daniel Chong	Alexandrea Yeo

Found by Rachel Wong Sook Leng

From: http://www.thesundaily.com/article.cfm?id=28369