'This is our time': Prabal Gurung inspired by S-E Asia's duality

The Singapore-born Nepalese-American designer sees in the region a balance of past and present

- Carmen Sin

Fashion designer Prabal Gurung left Singapore at the age of four for Kathmandu, but his early childhood here left vivid impressions. ST PHOTO: GAVIN FOO

(ST PHOTO: GAVIN FOO)

Fashion designer Prabal Gurung, a vocal fan of the margins, sees in Southeast Asia a winning balance of "reverence and reinvention".

The region's care for the past - what the 46-year-old Nepalese-American poeticises as "the ancestral story" - bound up with its urgency for modernity, is a constant source of inspiration, he says.

It is not conventional wisdom in the fashion capital of New York, where Gurung and his namesake label - worn by some of the world's most recognisable women like Michelle Obama, Catherine, Princess of Wales and Kamala Harris - are based. But then, the Singapore-born designer still feels a kinship with the tropics.

He says: "The world is now having a conversation about the mix of West and East. That's such a big part of our DNA, it is our way of being. And if we realise that and give into it, then with the Western world taking interest in ours, this is our time.

"This is how we can swim, how we can run."

Gurung is speaking to The Straits Times at The Laurus hotel at Sentosa, after addressing an audience of 700 at local fashion publication Vogue Singapore's annual Next In Vogue conference on Oct 16.

A lifetime has intervened since he first left the city-state at the age of four for Kathmandu in his family's native Nepal, but he has a prodigious memory for the impressions of early childhood.

Going to the movies, his father bringing home paper dolls, playing with his sister's clothes, his mum's makeup, a little black T-shirt printed with a string of pearls that he felt at home in, Gurung rattles off the touchstones of his brief time in Singapore.

He says: "Even though I was a kid when we left, the funny thing about a place is you often remember the essence of it."