From left: Winners of last year’s Audi Star Creation, Soravit Kaewkamon, 24 (Thailand), Roderic Wong, 28 (China), and Ko Youngji, 32 (South Korea) have been busy developing their collections under the mentorship of Douglas and Odile Benjamin of leading fashion house F J Benjamin. The capsule collection by the three 2012 winners debuts during Audi Fashion Festival at the Tent@Marina Promenade on 17 May 2013.
Thai designer, Kaewkamon presents the Beauty of Hornbill, the women’s wear complement to her competition collection last year, featuring defined cuts and strong structure on woven fabric and leather, but with shapes that are more feminine, bolder digital prints and more intricate laser-cut details.
Soravit Kaewkamon, 24, is a graduate of Silpakorn University with a degree in Decorative Arts. She has participated in and won several fashion design competitions in Thailand, including two awards at the Saha Group Bangkok Young Designers Awards 2010 and her winning menswear collection at SINGHA LIFE 2011. She is currently halfway through her internship with F J Benjamin, where she contributes in both menswear and womenswear design teams.
South Korean designer, Ko Youngji presents her new collection, La Porte, drawing inspiration from the time she spent in France while studying at the I’Ecole Superieure des Arts et techniques de la Mode (ESMOD). Using primarily pink, violet and ivory, she incorporates the beauty and mystery that centuries-old Parisian doors hold into this collection.
Ko Youngji, 32, whose grandmother was a hanbok designer, cultivated an interest in fashion through watching her grandmother work, Recently graduated from I’Ecole Superieure des Arts et techniques de la Mode (ESMOD) with a degree in fashion design and tailoring, Ko has dedicated over a decade of her life to fashion, starting from her fashion design major in high school back in South Korea. Her creations have been retailing at Korean multi-label shops like ALAND and Lab 5 since 2010. Ko plans to launch Deuxy, a womenswear label, in South Korea later this year.
Winner of last year’s Audi Young Designer Award, Roderic Wong presents Inspiration featuring material manipulation, but in black, violet and navy, contrasting with his 2012 competition collection which was predominantly white. This collection uses thick and heavy fabrics such as wool and pashmina to complement lighter, more elegant fabrics such as silk, and features more intricate details.
Roderic Wong, 28, spent most of his childhood in Shanghai but eventually moved to New Zealand to study computing, After receiving his diploma and spending a short period doing odd jobs, Wong realized that fashion was his calling. He then returned to China and completed a two-year course in fashion design at Donghua University before graduating from Raffles Design Institute (Shanghai) in 2012. Wong was crowned a winner of the Audi Star Creation 2012 competition and also earned the Audi Young Desinger Award title for his innovative womenswear collection, Tissue of Being.
A note for budding fashion designers:
The Singapore Designer Attachment Programme (SDAP) aims to develop fashion design talents in Singapore by providing a platform for designers to gain industry experience under the guidance of knowledgeable and experienced supervisors in established Singapore fashion companies. Selected designers will be placed under work attachments with fashion enterprises for a period of 12 months. This programme is managed by Textile and Fashion Federation (TaFf) Singapore and supported b SPRING Singapore.
SDAP is open to Audi Star Creation finalists and participants, as well as graduating designers from the Fashion Design Incubator (FDI) programme of PARCO next NEXT and graduates from local fashion schools such as Lasalle College of the Arts, Raffles Design Institute, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and Temasek Polytechnic.
For more information, please refer to TaFf’s website http://www.taff.org.sg/
Special thanks to Christina Chung from Huney’Z World for the beautiful runway photographs. See her blog post at this link: http://huneyzworld.blogspot.sg/2013/05/audi-fashion-festival-2013-audi-star.html
