“How do you wear your culture?”
On screen, Elon Koh asks the question into his microphone, turning ever-so-slightly to await an answer from his guest of the week beside him. Across the couch they sit on, his guest ponders the question for a moment before answering. By the end of the video, that answer appears in another form: stitched into a jacket or reworked into a dress.
Supp Cultures, the ongoing series he documents online for TikTok and Instagram, is ostensibly about clothing. Each week, Koh selects a cultural garment and reinterprets it through his own streetwear-inflected lens. But to describe it that way is to miss the point.
“The whole philosophy of the show is a celebration of culture,” Koh says. “It’s less about clothes and more about the storytelling.”
Koh is not a traditionally trained fashion designer, at least not in the way the industry tends to define it. He studied visual arts in school, then went on to pursue a degree in business analytics and computer science at National University Singapore. Yet over the years, his passion for the arts did not fade. In 2025, Koh attempted his first foray into the world of fashion, establishing Supp Design, a streetwear label known for its utilitarian carry vests. But Supp Cultures is where he finds his personal interests piqued, allowing himself to explore history and understand cultural roots.
“I feel like the whole point of art is storytelling,” Koh says. “It’s about how you interpret something and tell it through a visual.”
That is why—for Koh—a Supp Cultures piece has to begin with lived experience first. Although an entry in his online series only totals to a minute of watch-time, the behind-the-scenes process is relatively lengthy.
The first garment Koh approached was the hanfu, preferring to experiment with his Chinese-Singaporean heritage before attempting to adapt anyone else’s. Before sketching anything, he immersed himself in research, studying the construction and symbolism embedded into centuries-old Chinese dress. Very quickly, the project forced him into one of the internet’s favourite conversations—that being, the blurry, highly charged line between cultural appreciation and appropriation.
For Koh, the distinction came down to understanding. The more he researched, the more he realised how much meaning could be placed into details most people would never notice, such as the direction a lapel fold or the placement of a collar.
“There are rules to these garments,” Koh says. “For example, with the hanfu, the collar has to go left-over-right, because the opposite is associated with funerals and the dead. Things like that are very important.”
The lesson, then, was not simply about aesthetics, but responsibility. Koh recognised that reinterpretation could not begin and end with visual references pulled from archive photographs he’d seen online—much less from multinational fashion brands that seemed to borrow from culture only when it suited them. It required understanding why garments existed in the forms they did, and recognising which parts carried cultural weight.
His videos have attracted a steady stream of commentary, some of it critical, much of it engaged and for the most part, positively encouraging. Koh treats every comment as feedback.
“I’m still new to this,” he says, not just referring to cultural garments but also to fashion design. “I think it’s alright to make mistakes sometimes, but just learn from them.”
Koh admits that the series is teaching him in real time, especially as feedback from viewers within those specific cultures begins to shape how he thinks about what can and cannot be altered within cultural dress. And while Koh is disciplined in identifying, what he calls, “elements that cannot be changed” in traditional garments, he’s simultaneously discovered that a culture itself “is always changing.”
By his second video entry into Supp Cultures, Koh had settled on his trademark opening question. Interviewing his mixed-race Malay friend, Syafiq Muhammad, about the baju melayu, they spoke for hours and hours about Muhammad’s Malay identity, about what it meant to experience a culture, and about showing up for his community when it counted.
What stayed with Koh was how alive the garment felt, how naturally it moved between generations and occasions without losing its recognisability. Cultural garments were not static, they evolved just like the people who wore them. He eventually landed on a racing jacket made of heavy-duty denim—a material he often used for Supp Design streetwear pieces—but chose to retain the distinctive neckline button placket from the baju melayu.
“The whole point is not to reinvent or replicate a certain culture. The baju melayu is 700 hundred years old, and there’s different styles like the teluk belanga and the cekak musang,” Koh says. “I like adding my own take to it, like this is what I’ve contributed compared to the amount of history it has. It’s a drop of water in a huge pond.”
However fluid culture becomes across time, it never leaves emotion behind. During filming for his third Supp Cultures video, Koh recalls a particularly moving anecdote from another guest, Harini Madasamy, about her Indian culture. Madasamy talked fondly of how she and her sister draped themselves in bedsheets as children, pretending they were wearing saris while playing at home.
“It’s so endearing to me that she associates that memory with the sari,” Koh says. “I wanted to encapsulate that in my design.”
At the same time, Madasamy admitted that wearing an actual sari could sometimes feel intimidating and stressful for her because of the precision required to wrap it correctly. Koh responded by designing a dress that preserved the visual draping of the sari while eliminating the complicated construction beneath it.
With each new video added to the series, his inbox fills with messages asking when he plans to start selling the designs. Despite already having an apparel website set up through Supp Design, Koh is hesitant to turn his cultural creations into a product. The work, for him, is inseparable from the process that produces it—the conversations with his friends, the research he pores into, the mistakes he makes along the way. To remove it from that context, Koh suggests, would shift its meaning entirely.
“I want to respect certain designs I make that’s very personal to someone,” Koh explains. “I don’t want to tarnish that by making ones that people can just wear. It sort of defeats the purpose of storytelling.”
But even as he draws that line in the sand, the series has continued to expand in other ways—in his comments section, viewers eagerly volunteer themselves to be the next featured guest. Since we last spoke, Koh has already turned a qipao into a cotton-jacquard summer blouse, and a German dirndl that incorporates Chinese lapels. He also has upcoming plans for a Nigerian segment and a Nepalese one, among others.
What started as a personal experiment has slowly developed into a world tour, situated right at his sewing machine. Koh is still learning where to step in and where to step back, but the charming aspect of Supp Cultures is that there is no fixed answer. That’s the beauty of culture—a hodgepodge of experiences that seemingly contradicts itself, but finds unity in shared memory. It’s something that’s rooted in rules, yet always evolving; at times appropriated, but more often than not appreciated; inherently collective, but also deeply individual. Here sits Koh, trying, carefully, to turn what is lived into what can be worn.
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