Questionnaire / Father Collection. SPACESPACESPACESSPACESPACESPACE September 27, 2005

My parents are from Taiwan. I was born in Edison New Jersey where I've lived my whole life until next Sunday. We’re moving to Princeton-45 minutes away from here. I live on Myrtle St which is crossed by Simpson St. And at the end of Simpson St on the corner is a brick Jewish school. My elementary school bus stop was in front of it. I had two best friends who were both my neighbors, Danny and Heather. They called Heather trailer trash and they called Danny gay. He liked Heather. On Saturday mornings I went to Chinese school. And twice a year we would go to Flushing, Queens where my dad’s side of the family lives. And there I think that’s what Taiwan would feel like.

I lived in those places only. Between two streets and a dead end-Myrtle and Simpson, as far up as the brick Jewish school, 4 hours a week in a Chinese classroom, and twice a year in a make-shift Taiwan. And everything else that has influenced my design sensibility would be the stories my parents tell and the things read in books and TV.

I remember the way Heather looked-messy with her shirt falling off her shoulder. Mismatching. And I remember how Danny looked at baseball games. American. And the kids at Chinese school half American and half something else. And in Flushing there was Taiwan. I think my clothing will always fit somewhere between these places. It will be something from my childhood. I can’t talk about Africa because I’ve never been there. It would only be an Africa from the Discovery Channel. Or that time my grandmother bought me a nightshirt that said Afrika. With a koala. I know there aren’t koalas in Africa.

I don’t know the person I am designing for. I try everything on in the end and I like it. For someone else I don’t think they could like it for the same reasons so in the end it must be attractive somehow. I think it is attractive because it is neither repulsive nor pretty at all.

It’s easier to understand my own body. I make clothes thinking of my own-sometimes the clothes fit strangely on others. They’re too short. But because I am short. I don’t think to tailor them for anyone else because I didn’t think of them in the first step. At first I thought afterwards I would tailor them proportionally to their bodies. But then it didn’t feel right. I liked looking at my proportion even if it was odd on another. The proportion of the original garment should not change. If it must be longer, the waistband has to be dropped and everything in the same odd proportions as my own body. Otherwise it loses some of what makes it personal. And that I don’t want to change.

I know that my market will be very small. But I think it’s not difficult to understand the clothes or to relate because we all see the same things on TV and live in the same world. I like the familiar and the past but I also like the strange and interesting. I think we all have sweaters. And we all stare when something is not normal.

I’d like to work someplace where I can work the way we do now in school. I want to keep making my own ideas. I like so many things I don’t think anything could be really boring except having to dos something I don’t understand. I remember interning and having to find creative ways of folding a red envelope but it bothered me that I didn’t know where the envelope was going and why because I think that all matters to me. And there wasn’t a where and why. It was just to make a pretty envelope. I don’t want to do that.

I’d like Father Collection be in a space because then I could control the experience as well. The colors and the furniture and the pictures on the wall. Or on the Internet because then I could make a website. Or a catalogue because I’d be able to control the experience again. I like it to be a neat experience. Enclosed.

I like to relate many things. I like putting things in big books and looking at them over and over again. I like things enclosed. Thinking about what something looks like on a body- which is why it is difficult for me to croquis two dimensionally. It never feels correct or natural. I can plan slowly one detailed thought at a time but not with flat shapes and lines. I like to think about the fabric. I have to have both simultaneously- the fabric and the shape because they influence each other. My croquis book is less of croquis but more of notes.