Fashion week, move over. Singapore just had its own moment—and it happened inside an MRT station. On 14 May, Lasalle college of the arts staged De:centering, its 2026 graduate fashion show, at the soon-to-be-opened Cantonment MRT station. 14 final-year students from the BA (Hons) Fashion Design and Textiles programme took over the space to present collections that do exactly what the theme promises: decentre. Rather than looking to globalised fashion systems for direction, this class looked inward—to Southeast Asia’s cultural landscapes, material realities and lived experiences—and built entire worlds from there.
The result was one of the most compelling graduate showcases the city has seen in years. There was a collection rooted in the loss of Singapore’s Sungei Road flea market. Another that made music visible for the deaf community. One that imagined Chinese mythology in the year 3100. And one that began with a little boy who wanted to be a ballet dancer and was told he couldn’t. If this is what Singapore’s next generation of designers looks like, the industry should be paying very close attention.
“Our up-and-coming designers have boldly put forth what the future of fashion could look like.”
“Our up-and-coming designers have boldly put forth what the future of fashion could look like,” said Circe Henestrosa, Head of the School of Fashion at Lasalle. “They are challenging dominant fashion systems, foregrounding culture, ecology and sustainable production methods, thoughtful design and both traditional and modern craftsmanship.”
Five students were also recognised by industry partners on the night. Dyson awarded Ahmad Hanif Bin Ahmad Jamal the Innovative Hairstyle award, Quek Yu Tong the Creative Hairstyle award and Foo Kai Lin the Best Editorial award. Fragrance company Takasago presented awards to Jahnavi Gupta and Ayesha Mahmood, both of whom will have the opportunity to create their own fragrance—a fitting prize for two designers whose work is already deeply sensory.
All 21 collections from the graduating class will be on view at Lasalle’s Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore from 22 May to 3 June 2026 as part of The Lasalle Show Exhibition 2026. In the meantime, meet the 14 designers who made up De:centering—and remember their names.
1 / 14
Eng Li Wen
Li Wen designs like a documentarian—his work driven by a desire to preserve what is disappearing. Born in Malaysia and raised in Singapore, his collection responds to the loss of the city’s communal “third places” like the Sungei Road flea market. Drawing from workwear as a symbol of quiet resilience, 结霜桥 Gek Sng Kio blurs the boundary between garment and memory archive—clothing that carries the weight of heritage and everyday labour without ever feeling heavy.
2 / 14
Jahnavi Gupta
Jahnavi approaches fashion the way a product designer approaches engineering—with precision, rigour and a deep interest in how garments are constructed. Threshold takes the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan as its starting point, examining dress as a site of cultural rupture and adaptation. The dhoti and the tailored jacket—one tied to indigenous ritual, one to colonial structure—are brought into dialogue through garments that layer, wrap and reconfigure. Nothing is fixed. Everything is in transition. Gupta also received the Takasago fragrance award for her work.
3 / 14
Lim Sin Rong, Vanessa
Vanessa uses fashion as social advocacy, and The Uneven Starting Line is her most pointed argument yet. The collection examines class privilege in Singapore—a city that champions meritocracy while often overlooking the unequal starting points from which individuals begin. Through painting, appliqué and embroidery rendered in a scrappy, expressive style, she makes visible what the city’s dominant narrative tends to smooth over.
4 / 14
Nurul Izza Binte Rahmat
Izza, who designs under the name NIBR, has built a philosophy around a simple but radical idea: that modesty is not limiting but empowering. ModestScape combines contemporary design with modestwear functionality and locally sourced sustainable materials, responding directly to Singapore’s tropical climate and the gap in the market for quality, design-led modest fashion. Soft folds echo hijab wraps. Brutalist architectural lines ground the garments in strength. The result is modestwear that feels entirely of the moment.
5 / 14
Foo Kai Lin
Kai Lin designs clothing as emotional support—and in a generation where anxiety has become normalised, the idea feels more necessary than ever. Salt & Solace draws on the ocean, personal comfort objects and cultural identity to translate internal emotional experience into physical form. The collection’s signature gesture is pillowcase draping, where garments envelop the body like soft armour. Interactive metal trimmings double as fidget objects. It is fashion that asks to be touched, held and lived in. Kai Lin also received the Dyson Best Editorial award.
6 / 14
Audrey Wilhelmia Rahardjo
Audrey’s collection is rooted in a novel—Leila S. Chudori’s Laut Bercerita, which tells the story of Indonesian student activists who were forcibly disappeared during a period of political unrest in the 1990s. Using marine decomposition as allegory, Forgotten Tide explores transformation through material and making, drawing on Indonesian craft traditions—hand embroidery, textile development, fabric experimentation—to give form to themes of loss, memory and continuation.
7 / 14
Ayesha Mahmood
Ayesha’s collection does something genuinely remarkable: it makes music visible. Auralai, meaning “hearing through multiple senses”, translates the Carnatic composition ‘Gowrimanohari’ into tactile textiles using Chladni patterns—scientific experiments that make sound visible through vibration. Inspired by the deaf community in Chennai, the collection proposes fashion as a bridge between those who hear and those who do not. Rhythm and melody are expressed through technique, colour and intentional breaks in pattern. Mahmood also received the Takasago fragrance award.
8 / 14
Kayla Adelia Rudiansyah
Kayla is a pattern cutter who treats conventional garment forms as flexible frameworks open to reinterpretation. Dual explores duality through the folkloric figure of the doppelgänger—deconstructing Western and Eastern classical garments, including the kebaya and kain panjang, to reimagine and disrupt their familiar cultural codes. Second-hand garments are combined with new fabrics, the collection’s argument embedded in its very materials: that identity, like clothing, can be remade.
9 / 14
Ahmad Hanif Bin Ahmad Jamal
Hanif—who also goes by Nif—began with a childhood dream of becoming a ballet dancer, and built an entire collection around what that dream was told it couldn’t be. Silent Pirouette uses ballet as a metaphorical stage to examine gendered expectations and the rigid binaries of “feminine” and “masculine”, challenging constructed norms through textile innovation and reworked deadstock fabric. His argument is embedded in his materials as much as his silhouettes—unwanted fabric given new life, unwanted dreams given a stage. Hanif received the Dyson Innovative Hairstyle award.
10 / 14
Anchanaa Ashok
Originally from India, Anchanaa brings her heritage directly into her practice through embroidery and artisanal craft. Framebound reimagines what collaboration between designer and artisan can look like—proposing a slower, more conscious fashion narrative that values both process and people. Her design language is moody, fluid and quietly feminine, with an overarching commitment to supporting the artisan communities that inform her work.
11 / 14
Viola Veronika
Viola works directly on the body—draping, pleating and shaping volume in three-dimensional space—and Misfold is perhaps her most personal argument yet. The collection responds to the fashion industry’s relentless pressure for perfection and constant newness, embracing imperfection instead as a construction principle. Asymmetrical volumes, less-waste draping and corset-inspired tension systems produce garments designed not as fixed forms but as evolving structures that shift with the wearer. Imperfection, she proposes, is not a flaw but a form of continuity.
12 / 14
Keila Zaneta Arifin
Keila’s work is an act of cultural reclamation. Rooted in her Banjarese heritage from Banjarmasin, Kalimantan, Binar responds to the dilution of ethnic Indonesian identities through migration and modern trends—drawing directly from the Baamar Galung Pancaran Matahari, a Banjarese bridal attire, and adopting its techniques of hand beading and fabric dyeing alongside spray dye and silk-screen printing. The result is bold, vibrant and contemporary, insisting on cultural continuity without sacrificing relevance.
13 / 14
Quek Yu Tong
Yu Tong, who designs as Solyu, is a maximalist—and Rebirth is her most ambitious vision yet. Set in the year 3100, the collection imagines a world where Chinese cultural identity has been eroded into fragments, and responds by reviving it through mythology. Inspired by Ne Zha—the defiant spirit who remade his own destiny—the collection blends Chinese knotting, expressive colour and speculative silhouettes into fashion as time capsule. Yu Tong received the Dyson Creative Hairstyle award.
14 / 14
Andrea Sanchez Guajardo
Originally from Mexico and now based in Singapore, Andrea brings an urgent political dimension to the show. Origenes confronts gender-based violence in Mexico through surrealist principles—leather body-moulding and negative space disrupting the boundary between body and garment, creating forms that both conceal and expose. The female form is re-presented as a wearable structure, redirecting the external gaze to challenge objectification and reclaim control over how the body is seen.
