Midway through May this year, the who’s who of Singapore’s fashion scene—from editors and influencers to budding designers—gathered in the basement level of the unopened Cantonment MRT station. For one evening only, it was to be transformed into a celebration of Singapore’s next generation of designers: the setting for Lasalle College of the Arts’ 2026 graduate fashion show.
Rather than being a silent backdrop to the evening, the station came alive, imbuing the show with a frisson of the unexpected. Models were backlit by fully functional trains pulling into and out of the platform; the electronica soundtrack was interspersed with standard MRT safety announcements. “You wouldn’t believe the level of bureaucracy it took to make this happen,” one usher quipped as he seated attendees—among whom was Minister for Transport Jeffrey Siow.
For Dr Circe Henestrosa, the head of Lasalle’s School of Fashion, the show’s unusual setting was less an exercise in novelty than a natural extension of the department’s mission: to develop critically engaged young design talent in Singapore. The show’s theme, De:Centering, asked students to design with a simple yet crucial question in mind: what would it mean for their creations to be truly unmoored from Eurocentric industry norms, centred instead on Southeast Asia? “We’re positioning Singapore as a site of knowledge production rather than simply consumption,” Dr Henestrosa explains.
For the designer whose collection opened the show, the creative process unearthed a uniquely Singaporean dilemma at the heart of the city’s fashion scene. Eng Li Wen’s oversized, workwear-inspired pieces drew from street vendors at the historic Sungei Road Flea Market. “The reason I chose to look at this cultural heritage comes down to this one question that my friends from overseas always ask me: ‘What is a Singaporean fashion brand?’ Eng explains. To the young designer, the question remains surprisingly—and disappointingly—unanswered. “Sure, we can all name a few off the top of our heads, but would you say that they’re uniquely Singaporean brands?” he challenges. “They could be found anywhere else in the world. Unlike Malaysia and Indonesia, which have quite a strong fashion identity, we’re still developing ours in Singapore.”
During the primary research process, which involved sourcing items from thrift stores and interviewing vendors, Eng discovered that the flea market had been closed since 2017, after years of being whittled away by the construction of the Jalan Besar MRT station. “My designs were based on something that was affected by an MRT station in Singapore,” he points out. “So I think the location of the show was quite a funny, ironic callback to the collection itself.” His designs were especially striking against the sleek glass and metal of the underground station—only emphasising their commentary on how creative and cultural spaces in Singapore struggle to survive.
It’s a struggle that becomes all the more glaring when one considers the compact nature of Singapore’s fashion scene. One could imagine a young designer falling through the cracks of a creative network as bustling and complex as London’s or New York’s. But in a city as small as Singapore, where an entire train station can be handed over to a graduate fashion show, there should be a concentrated pool of resources. Few are better placed to see this than Ting-Ting Zhang, CEO of the Singapore Fashion Council, whose work bridging creative talent and industry leaders gives her an inside view of what makes Singapore unique. “In some ways, Singapore’s ecosystem is compact enough that meaningful partnerships between industry, government agencies, educators, and brands can happen more efficiently,” Zhang explains.
“I don’t think the issue is a lack of talent—Southeast Asia has an incredible depth of creativity. The challenge is often around infrastructure, visibility, and long-term development pathways.”
Ting-Ting Zhang, CEO of the Singapore Fashion Council
There is a remarkably robust network of educational and financial initiatives aimed at nurturing emerging talent in Singapore. The Singapore Fashion Council’s Global Fashion Programme and Singapore Stories fashion show make up a key pillar, allowing young designers to connect with buyers, manufacturers, and international markets. At Lasalle, support begins not with a business plan but with the intangibles: skills more conceptual and cultural than commercial. “What truly distinguishes a designer is their ability to articulate a clear point of view,” says Dr Henestrosa.
And yet, Singapore’s fashion ecosystem presents something of a paradox. There is, after all, no shortage of support, which raises an obvious question: if the resources are there, why do so few designers make the leap from promising graduate to enduring fashion brand?
The answer, according to many in the industry, has less to do with talent than with survival. “I don’t think the issue is a lack of talent—Southeast Asia has an incredible depth of creativity,” Zhang says. “The challenge is often around infrastructure, visibility, and long-term development pathways.” It’s difficult to overstate the array of skills required of a young designer today, from sketching collections to managing finances and building communities around their brand. Visibility may be within reach in the digital age, but stability is as elusive as ever. According to Zhang, the pressure becomes even more acute in Singapore, where the domestic market offers limited room for experimentation. Brands often need to think regionally, even globally, almost from inception.
For the students preparing to leave the relative safety of academia, that reality is impossible to ignore. “I feel like if I had not gone to school, it would be very hard to access all these opportunities,” says Vanessa Lim, another graduate designer from this year’s show. Through Lasalle, she has presented her work on a professional runway, attended industry talks, and developed connections that would otherwise have been unavailable. But translating that momentum into a business is another challenge entirely.
“You still have to build from scratch, from the ground up,” she says. “Besides fashion, you need the business aspect as well.” The prospect is daunting enough that Lim hesitates when asked whether she intends to launch her own label after graduation. For now, she plans to gain experience first. Fashion may celebrate youthful ambition, but rent, production costs, and payroll tend to be less romantic.
Eng is equally candid. Many graduates, he notes, eventually gravitate towards commercial fashion because they have little choice. “At the end of the day, we need the money,” he says with a shrug. He hesitates to refer to it as selling out, but his discouragement is palpable. Building a creative practice is difficult enough; building one that can pay the bills is something else altogether. “We need a place to make mistakes and grow,” Eng says. “That’s the support we need.”
If there is a common refrain running through conversations with educators, industry leaders, and young designers alike, it is sustainability—not in an environmental sense, but a personal one. Fashion identities and ecosystems are rarely built overnight. For Zhang, the priority is creating the conditions for brands to grow beyond a single breakout moment. “Often, what makes the biggest difference is opening the right doors at the right stage of a brand’s growth,” she says.
At Lasalle, the conversation stretches even further into the future. Through the Equatorial Fashion Research Lab, Dr Henestrosa and her colleagues have begun taking the theme of De:Centering beyond the Lasalle runway, asking what fashion might look like when viewed entirely from the lens of the tropics. The absence of traditional seasons, she argues, presents an opportunity to rethink some of fashion’s most deeply embedded assumptions.
“In the tropics, where spring/summer and fall/winter cycles do not exist, we have an opportunity to challenge deeply ingrained Eurocentric models and rethink fashion through new frameworks of materiality, temporality, and the body,” she says. It’s a proposition so obvious it feels almost radical—why not design for the environment in which we live and breathe?
Perhaps this, ultimately, is how a distinctly Singaporean fashion identity will emerge. Not from a single silhouette, motif, or national aesthetic—Singapore has always been too porous and shaped by exchange for that—but in the confidence to treat its own conditions, climate, and cultural complexity as worthy subjects of design. When asked what excites him about the future, Eng returns to the question that first inspired his collection. “I hope that one day, when someone asks what a Singapore fashion brand is, that’s something I can answer with confidence,” he says. “Something that’s uniquely here, and you can’t find anywhere else.” For now, the answer remains a work in progress. The search for it, however, has already begun.
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