“Everything under heaven is in utter chaos.”
In the fashion industry, the canaries in the coal mine are the manufacturers. Economic conditions affect the openings and closures of factories, while the front-facing PR firms of the industry do their best to create a business-as-usual façade. From where I am standing, I hear the voices of confusion. “How is your business?” they’d ask. “Could be better,” is my standard reply these days. As I deal with the upper-tier of fashion production, we hear of local and overseas wholesalers cutting back orders, meaning the middle class is not doing too well. And this was before America unilaterally imposed tariffs that threw the global market into turmoil.
The world has rapidly increased its dependency on AI and traditional media has been cannibalised by social media, which in turn is being encroached by meandering, often-meaningless live-streaming, podcasting and algorithm-pushed short-form videos.
Artifice is replacing realism as the virtual provides a mental shield from worldly troubles, no different from the religions of old. As media consumers retreat into their chosen echo chamber(s), we are now seeing a rift between realities.
And yet, as I write these words by my window, I can hear the sounds of birds chirping and mothers rallying their children to school. When I walk to work I see this spring’s newborn kittens enjoying warm sunshine, their mothers eating kibbles that I and several retirees had left in a bowl, and a lone stray dog who waits in front of a Family Mart to be fed by passerby. Watching him gobble up sausages out of my hands is one of life’s little pleasures.
The earth rotates without a care for our existence upon it.
“The future is both written and unwritten, but the present always exists.”
ROSEN-X began some years ago as the practical counterpart to ROSEN, during a time when the business became hectic, each day becoming more unpredictable than the last. Silks and wools were replaced by hardy nylon. Silhouettes were streamlined, articulation emphasised.
Slowly but surely, ROSEN-X became an outlet where I could express the hidden rage that has propelled me forward since childhood. If ROSEN is melancholic hope, ROSEN-X is the aggression needed to destroy the old ways and create a new path forward. The way I run this business is unorthodox, prioritising intellectual and creative output to pay fair wages to the select few people whom I can trust to make my complex designs; profit margins and personal compensation coming in second. In good times, designers can wax poetic about abstract beauty. In tough times, we are beholden to economic conditions that change in the blink of an eye.
Reality is grounded in materiality. Hence the most fundamental building blocks of a good piece of clothing begin with the very nature of fabrications.
Sifting through hundreds of swatches, it became an imperative that sterile, flat-looking fabrics that are hardly discernible from computer-generated renderings must be avoided.
Life is painful, joyous, yet a cause for celebration, for shadows make light beautiful. When I think about the people who wear the clothes I make, I picture ordinary individuals walking steadily into an unknown future despite all their fears and trepidation, even when that future is not of their choosing.
Original Kosmos Bomber design for ROSEN-X IV
Updated Kosmos Bomber design for ROSEN-X: TERMINA-2
When I think about making clothes, I think about all the people who have poured their mentally-taxing labour into making garments of high complexities; all the gallons of water that goes into growing cotton and the precious fossil fuel refined into making nylon yarns. I envision all the hands who made it possible getting each and every single component from all over the region congregating into one single location to be immediately dispatched to the right people without any missing parts and I can trust that system to work flawlessly. I am so grateful that this level of logistical and infrastructure convenience now exists for a small producer like me so I can do my work in transforming raw materials into something of value for each and every one of my customers.
I cannot in good conscience offer anything less than the best of my abilities and my effort in ensuring that what is made is the ultimate expression of a labour of love. Every new collection made is one step further from the shore into an unknown ocean; the waves grow ever larger, the undercurrents stronger. That is to say, every new collection is more difficult to make than the last, with new sets of difficulties previously unseen. I don’t know what I don’t know until I take a new step.
“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
In times of economic uncertainty, the machinations of the fashion industry have evolved into a behemoth that threatens to subsume our humanity and integrity. Hypersexualised slop is presented on a gold platter to cater to the lowest common denominator as everyone is fighting for a slice of a shrinking pie. Many independent voices, under threats of reduced exposure, higher expenses and diminishing revenues, are compelled to adopt the same tactics to survive, until such time a new order is born. By the time the world recalibrates itself, we will have lost another collective billion brain cells.
What we have made for the Termina series is an expression of our own contrarian stance in this dogfight for survival, be it through our garments or our imageries. We have come together to brace ourselves against uncertainty, despite the siren call of pseudo-comforting atomisation. Our clothes are now a reflection of the need to be agile, strong, and flexible. Our clothes are now a reflection for the need to be agile, strong and flexible. We have to engage with reality or it will sweep us away.
We are known for our textiles and we do not have plans to deviate from it. We want our clothes to feel substantial and protective – not plucked off an assembly line, drafted from decades-old pattern blocks, and manufactured with cost-cutting measures using flimsy fabrics; not buoyed by persuasive advertising that mask merchandise which are no more inspiring than mass-produced garments made in the back alleys of factory subcontractors.
Change is happening before our very eyes, forcing us to dance to new tunes to survive. But dance with a backbone we must, for anything less will see us lost like small rafts in a turbulent sea.
