why should clothes restrict us? they should enable us andenform the things that we do and the things that we doobviously emform who we are. my name is tuyen tran, and i'm a fashion designer. i just graduated fromparsons school of design. my dad, he was a war veteran. and he was a refugee. and the us at the time, had a program
where after the vietnma war, they were sending refugees to the us to basically start a newlife for their families. and i actually moved to the united states a couple of months after i was born. i grew up in twin falls, idaho. so growing up, i didn'thave the same experiences that my parents had, but iwas always kind of instilled with the ideals that they had.
i pursued fashionbecause i wanted to learn the mystery behind creating clothes. and i wanted to learn the craft of it. so this collection is called assemble. it takes inspiration from the idea that clothing is assembled bypeople, by different hands. it's not just this image thatwe see so often in magazines. there's the trouserswith these pocket welts that then adjust into straps.
i like to play a loit withconnecting lines and seams. so instead of traditional pockets, i try to see what else i can do with them, what other functions ican connect into them. what i think about sustainability is that it's just making things that last. clothes are sustainablebecause it's almost impossible to degrade a shirt completely. you can always pass iton, and on , and on.
or reuse it for something else, and that's somethingthat i'm trying to pursue by obviously creating a garment that is as beautiful as i can make it, that'll encourage the wearer to love it as long as possible or at least sourcing fibersthat can biodegrade harmlessly. i just find it so much easierto get all my sources locally, just because i can go to the factory
or i can go to the buttonstore and see it in real life. i try to design very hands on. i like to look at my designs, i like to feel them, and i like to converse with thepeople that i'm working with face to face, and obviously,working and sourcing local enables me to do that. i guess growing up in idaho, there wasn't a huge vietnamese community,
or really asian community, so i did always kind offelt like an outsider, or at least, i knew i was an immigrant. so from that, i felt like ihad to try a little bit harder than my peers. and i think in the longrun that helped me out because by constantly aiming for more, i was just basically aimingfor the best that i could be. i think the cool thingabout living in the us,
and especially workingin the us for fashion, is that for me, i don'thave a stereotypical image of the american wardrobe. it's very mix and match, it's very full of different subcultures, and i find that very interesting. and the fact that i can work in fashion in that kind of environment in this kind of free for allenvironment is quite amazing.
i think fashion, first andforemost, is this image, it's this very 2d portrayal of the trends that are happening now, but then what's fascinatingabout fashion, i think, is that underneath thattwo dimensional image are these three-dimensional garments that are very sustainable, that can last a lifetime if you let them.