She's In Fashion

Trendsetter. Fashion entrepreneur. Social media superstar. And airline miles acquirer? The jetsetting YOYO CAO aka @yoyokulala is a wearer of many hats (and boy, does she lurve hats). We learn about the ins (she’s a shopaholic, duh!) and outs (she could have been the next Angelababy, huh?) of the international fashion sensation.

- Jonathan Fam

For someone whose fame and influence is inextricably linked to Instagram, nothing about Yoyo Cao fits perfectly into a square. (We know Instagram has portrait and landscape modes now, but you get our drift.) Like her Insta-nick @yoyokulala. It sounds, depending who you ask, like something out of a Dr Seuss story or a Japanese cafe. The name doesn’t actually mean anything, having stemmed from the restless mind of a web-surfing teenage girl. “It was just something I came up with when I was 14 for an ICQ username,” Yoyo says matter-of-factly, though we have a sneaking suspicion that a portion of her followers have never heard of that once-ubiquitous online chat messenger. Interestingly, ‘kulala’ is Swahili for ‘sleeping’ — thank you, Google — which also means that her username can be loosely translated to ‘Yoyo is sleeping’. Ironic since the fashion entrepreneur, street style star and social media personality is absolutely woke.

It’s not the first time we’re meeting Yoyo, who always seems to be in the centre of a flurry of action. We’ve met her at events, the Singapore Fashion Week, Zouk, though clearly we’ve made an impression as deep as an Insta-story of someone’s lunch.