SINGAPORE - In a grey-toned room in the industrial arts district of New York, models stepped out from between two walls of chrome, wrapped in the sinuous designs of Grace Ling – the Singaporean dressing pop stars and provocateurs alike.

It was the opening day of the 81st New York Fashion Week (NYFW), where the 26-year-old School of the Arts (Sota) alumna took centre stage in a runway debut watched closely by some of the industry’s leading lights. 

On her books are singers J.Lo and FKA Twigs and actresses Anya Taylor-Joy and Julia Fox.

After that Sept 8 premiere, Vogue US hailed Ling’s garments as sculptural, “alluring in their severity and welcoming in their mystique”. 

Ling’s eponymous label is only three years old, but the designer has already made history as the first Singaporean to gain interim membership to the Council of Fashion Designers America (CFDA), whose ranks include cult designers Tom Ford and Rick Owens.

The Parsons School of Design graduate is now one of three finalists for an inaugural CFDA grant worth US$100,000 (S$134,200) for emerging designers of Asian descent. 

With the winner set to be announced in early 2024, Ling, speaking to The Straits Times from New York, traced her banner year to a difficult beginning, when she emptied her bank accounts to launch her brand in a pandemic. 

“Some days I think it was the hardest thing I ever had to do,” she said. And that feeling has not waned.

“The market is so competitive and oversaturated. Everyone has an idea in New York,” she said.

Maybe so, yet Ling, who made Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list for the arts in 2022, showed an uncommon insistence on technique from the outset. 

The signature Grace Ling butt bag took three years to develop, she said.

Fashioned from aero aluminium, one of the only metals in the world to be infinitely recyclable, it is shaped like a derriere. The gentle curve of the buttocks is replicated in the purse’s inner compartment and the hinges of the bag have been hidden for a more natural look. 

These troublesome little details excite her, she added, even if no one but the wearer will notice. 

Fashion authorities such as Vogue and WWD have pronounced her apparel sophisticated and feminine, referencing her longline dresses that coax the eye to the ogee curve of the wearer’s side – what the 18th-century painter and critic William Hogarth called the line of beauty.

But Ling would place the essence of her offerings in their mischievous accents. 

Jacket shoulders might be unusually raised or curiously rounded; a clasp will resemble a vertebrae. 

“Simple silhouettes with a touch of deviance,” she said. 

The formula reconciles her arty instincts with her business savvy. Schooled in the fine arts, the surrealist art movement is Ling’s “constant inspiration”, but she is equally attentive to what looks good on the body, she said. 

“I believe the best kind of art is sellable,” she said, and part of the draw of New York was its fine balance between commercialisation and art. 

The fashion capital also held the tug of momentum, added Ling, for whom every other city feels like “slow motion”.

Her own chutzpah drove her speedy rise, when in the first two years of setting up, she promoted her work to a trending fashion Instagram page that posted her designs to its page. 

It caught the eye of J.Lo’s stylists, who soon placed an order that lifted Ling from obscurity. 

Of her tireless self-promotion in the early days, Ling said: “It was endless grit, never stopping, never taking no for an answer.”

Most recently, hot on the heels of her NYFW debut, she took her collection to a temporary showroom in Paris. There, in the birthplace of couture, she realised she had gained international recognition. 

“On the streets of Paris, I bumped into people in the fashion industry whom I look up to. I tried to introduce myself but they already knew who I was,” she said. 

It was a cherry on top of an unprecedented year, one that has brought a sense of belonging and, most of all, assurance that she is on the right track, Ling said. 

Singapore may seem a cultural backwater when pitted against the rarefied spaces she now moves in, but the designer maintains she still feels the influence of home. 

On one level, the ideas that fascinated her as a Sota student – surrealism, the absurd and the probing work of local performance artist Lee Wen – continue to inform her practice, she said. 

On another, the enormous impact of her upbringing on her artistic imagination is just coming into view. 

“I think maybe I didn’t recognise it earlier, but Singapore can be conservative in terms of the way people express themselves, so I went in the opposite direction. I always wanted to wear crazy things in school, I wanted to be unconventional,” she said. 

One of the very first garments she made was a shredded version of the Sota school uniform, which she wore like an armour against sameness, she added. 

The premium on self-expression also arose from her creative household, where her father worked as a set designer and her mother a make-up artist, Ling said. 

From her father’s workshop, magical objects like a life-size batmobile or a castle were seemingly conjured out of wood, she said. 

“This idea of things coming to life was very big in my life growing up,” added Ling, who as a designer, has inherited her father’s gift of turning the imagined into the real. 

From her mother, Ling took mettle.

“She wanted all women to be successful, so she gave everything to make sure I got opportunities,” said Ling, a first-generation college graduate.

These days, Ling comes home no more than once every two years. Still, home has a way of cropping up, even if obliquely. 

Her latest collection features a familiar pesky fowl: an ink-black bag shaped like a hyper-realistic crow. In show notes, she called it – like most Singaporeans would – evil.