There is very little about Xiang Gao’s approach to fashion that is concerned with mainstream approval. To understand this, you need only look at how the young creative first founded her label: by walking away from a job designing for some of the biggest names in fashion. Gao had just completed two years on the knitwear team at Calvin Klein, where she worked with designers like Raf Simons, Pieter Mulier, and Matthieu Blazy. But when it came time to forge her own path, she took a sharp left: Gao left New York for Shanghai, and started her own offbeat, psychedelic label inspired not by Western icons, but by Kasik Wong—a largely forgotten Chinese-American designer who dressed Salvador Dali and Tina Turner, then slipped from the record.
“After two years at Calvin Klein, I realised I just didn’t want to work for other people anymore,” Gao says. Her time at the brand was spent on its runway-focused line, 205W39NYC—a short-lived experiment led by Belgian designer Raf Simons, billed as the premium, high-fashion version of Calvin Klein’s typical minimalism. “It was very intense, because I joined the brand during its first season,” she recalls. Entering the brand on the heels of her graduation from Parsons, Gao was thrust straight into experimentation. “Calvin Klein is such an important part of American fashion, and the whole team was trying to figure out what [our version] of Americana would be,” she says. As creative director of the brand, Simons took a campy, tongue-in-cheek approach, unafraid to blend their premium offerings with lowbrow pop culture references. Gao and the rest of the team embarked on a deep dive into Americana, from studying screengrabs of Spielberg movies—Simons’s Spring/Summer 2019 collection paid homage to Jaws—to analysing cowboy culture and folk crafts. “All of the research represented something,” says Gao. “There were so many ideas in our shows, and in a way, I learned how to transform all of these messages into garments and design.”
But the pinnacle of luxury fashion will always bring far more than purely technical lessons, and for Gao, her stint at Calvin Klein revealed a disparity that sat at the heart of the corporate fashion model. All art forms are ultimately a dialogue between the artist and audience—perhaps none more so than fashion, where the wearer is integral to the design. In this sense, Gao couldn’t have felt more disconnected from her work at Calvin Klein.
“When you work in a company, you can’t really talk to the people who buy your clothes,” Gao says. “With our designs, we were really pushing boundaries and doing something extreme, but we lost a bit of connection with real life. It felt like the fashion I was working on was up in the air—I didn’t feel the realness of it.” After two years at Calvin Klein, the decision to start her own brand was an obvious one, and it also proved oddly prescient. A year after Gao stepped away from the label, Calvin Klein shut down 205W39NYC altogether, with executives citing the label’s “fashion forward” sensibility as one reason it never resonated with consumers. To some, it might have read as a sign that creativity was under threat—but Gao paid the warning no heed. She had already launched a venture entirely on her own terms, and was steadfastly uninterested in watering it down for easy consumption.
Founded while Gao was still in New York, Penultimate was envisioned as an eclectic, funky blend of Gao’s deep-rooted Chinese heritage and the American design language she had come to know and love at Calvin Klein. To fully flesh out her own take on the subject matter, she looked to the past. “When I had just started my brand, I really wanted to look at what my ancestors had started, and how [Chinese designers] brought Oriental tastes into a Western fashion context,” Gao says. Her search led her back to Wong: a pioneer of 1970s American counterculture whose work has largely flown under the radar in the modern era. He was a maverick, allegedly turning down a position at Pierre Cardin in favour of launching his own label. In his singular approach, Gao found both a moodboard and a philosophy.
“At the time, the wearable art movement was huge. Artists like Kasik Wong were creating really exciting things that blended art with performance,” Gao explains. Wearable art was a design movement that blurred the boundaries between fashion and spectacle, creating clothing that could easily double as performance art—a genre-bending approach that fascinates Gao. “I enjoy challenging myself and challenging other people to [blur] the boundary of what you can wear every day, and what you can’t. For me, it’s an interesting game,” Gao says. A true student of counterculture, the rules of her game certainly don’t follow the traditional metrics of success. For Gao, the worst thing a designer could be is not unknown or unappreciated, but mundane. “I want a challenge. We’re all bored of seeing the same old garments,” Gao says. She is even blunter about what she will not chase. “If people want Uniqlo, they can go buy Uniqlo. I would rather create something that I find beautiful.”
The reality of being a young designer in a foreign country is not as driven by ideals and creative freedom as one might imagine, though—shortly after launching the label, Gao ran into a host of visa-related issues that were as predictable as they were frustrating. In 2020, she made the decision to relocate to Shanghai—but instead of narrowing her horizons, the move back to her home country opened up a dizzying new array of creative and cultural inspirations. In America, research meant poring over reference photos on a screen; in China, inspiration was to be found on every street corner and alleyway. “The way I research has shifted. I travel a lot, see different kinds of people, go to all kinds of antique markets and exhibitions, galleries, and museums,” Gao lists. Her research expeditions know no bounds, from studying textile techniques with mountain tribes to inspecting the bustling small commodity markets of Yiwu. “Basically, I realised that as a designer, I have to live my life first—then bring it into my design.”
The deeper Gao dives into life—the kind lived off screen—the further she moves from the traditional orbit of luxury fashion. “Right now, I’m more into works by people who have not studied design, art or fashion,” she says. “Unknown people whose names you don’t even know—their work is sometimes weird, and more original. It carries the pure excitement of just wanting to make stuff.” Ironically, much of Penultimate’s design philosophy—its commitment to weirdness and kitsch, its refusal to be easily understood—mirrors that of Gao’s first entry into the fashion industry. Those same offbeat instincts may have sealed 205W39NYC’s fate. Six years on, they are what keep Penultimate alive.
GRAZIA Singapore: How did your creative journey start?
Xiang Gao (XG): I’m from China. I was born in the ’90s, and I grew up in Wenzhou—it’s a city where a lot of people have their own business, and many people are involved in the fashion industry. I started painting from a very young age, and continued until I got to the China Academy of Art, where I studied fashion design as my BA major. After that, I worked at a fashion brand in Shanghai for a couple of months, and then decided I wanted to study abroad. I applied to Parsons, and was accepted to the Parsons MFA program for Fashion Design and Society. I then joined Calvin Klein 205W39NYC—this was when Raf Simons was the creative director, and I was doing knitwear on his team. After two years at Calvin, I started my own brand in New York, and I eventually moved back to Shanghai in 2020, and I’m now based in Shanghai.
GS: Who is the Penultimate brand for?
XG: I’m always kind of surprised to see who actually buys my designs. To be honest, I have quite a wide range of customers: sometimes they’re rappers, sometimes they’re artists, it’s a mixture of all different kinds of people. For me, it’s just fun to see who actually buys my clothes, and how they wear them. I really enjoy seeing customers style my clothes with pieces from other brands.
GS: You draw a lot of inspiration from Kasik Wong, who often designed costumes for performing artists. Do you see yourself as a costume designer?
XG: I have made costumes for artists and dance groups a couple of times already, and I think it comes very naturally. At the beginning, I didn’t really see myself as a costume designer, but I’ve been doing my collections for about eight years now, and the way I present my lookbooks often attracts artists and performers. They see potential in my designs, and so they reach out to me. That gives me the opportunity to sort of exaggerate my ideas from a more commercial or daily silhouette to something more dramatic, which is really fun for me. It’s another way to apply the same ideas and textiles. I base every one of these projects on the artist and persona that I work with, which allows us to connect on a deeper level—it’s always fun.
GS: What are some new techniques you have used recently?
XG: For my Fall/Winter 2026 collection, I used a lot of very realistic-looking prints. I found out about [an interesting trend] on Taobao, where people are buying sofa pillows that look like real animals—like lobsters or fish, for example. To me, that sort of raises questions about the idea of real life versus a simulation—modern-day life feels less and less like living in a real, natural world, and maybe that’s why people are pushed to create weird, [hyperrealistic] objects like this. So in this collection, I’ve actually taken those pillows and used them as prints.
GS: How do you define success for Penultimate?
XG: I’m doing okay. I don’t know what success means for a fashion brand—I feel like it depends on the stage you’re at with your brand, whether you’re very small, middle level or really big. You’ll always face different kinds of difficulties, and you can never really say it’s good enough or completely successful, but I’m still happy with the pace that I have now. I like my life and my work; it has a nice balance which still gives me the space to keep trying something different, and not always offering the same old things. That’s what I define as success: being able to innovate.
GS: What’s next for Penultimate?
XG: I’m trying to start my own shop—to create a physical space which, when people enter, allows them to sense the atmosphere and concept of the brand as well as the clothes. I’m in the process of trying to figure out what kind of store I want to create. To be honest, as a designer, I’m always in the process of this—it’s not only about a store, but also the whole brand. I’m constantly trying to search for the new element of this universe.
GS: How do you see Penultimate evolving in the future?
XG: I want people to always look at my collections and still feel that it’s Penultimate, no matter how much I change—even though I don’t have a typical signature for the brand, and even though all of my collections are a bit different. I think there’s always a sense of curiosity in my designs, and a sense of life in my collections, which is quite important for me.
This story originally appeared in the August 2026 issue of GRAZIA Singapore.
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