Can you believe that we actually put vintage on the runway?
Making our debut at Orchard Road Fashion Week (ORFW), it was the most unexpected moment in my career that I never imagined doing for the last 6 years we have been running Soeng Signature.
While most collections would stick to an abstract concept, I wanted to draw inspiration from my personal life that's kinda like a coming of age movie. For nights, I scoured through old Facebook posts, digitized copies of my family photos and doom scrolled through my phone's photo album to find old photos of myself living from my teen years in Singapore, college years in Los Angeles, summer 16 in NYC and back to Singapore. Seeing old photos of myself and the metamorphosis I went through made me cry. Not because of grief, but rather because of how much I grew up into the person I am now.
For a long time, I have been wanting to launch Soeng Signature 10 years ago; however, I wasn't ready for it. I always knew the seeds were planted since college, but again, I had yet to fully grasp the knowledge of running a shop. Also, I was purusing a career in writing for magazines, so that didn't give me much room to be able to run a vintage boutique full time. Even though I had the vision and the ideas, it had always been inside me all along - even to this day. That's why I wanted the ORFW collection to be a visual memoir because it was a journey of self discovery to finding who I'd always been whether I was at home (in Singapore) or abroad (like NYC and LA, where I have called those cities my 2nd home).
Rather than to design a whole collection out of scratch, I went through racks of vintage and designer archives that never saw the light of day outside of the warehouse. Of course with the exception of a few upcycled pieces and the Alexis dress, which made its debut down the runway. To see my story being told through clothes and having the models embody it made me proud to put Soeng Signature into the stratosphere.
Now, you can shop the collection online!