On The Radar: Shawna Wu, the Singapore-raised designer dressing pop stars in New York

SINGAPORE – Shawna Wu trains like an anime heroine. That is to say, at length and ecstatically. The Singapore-born, Taiwanese fashion designer based in New York has for years made yearly trips to her motherland, where she stays for up to months at a time, studying ancient crafts under various teachers. 

Grimacing at the modern habit of airing all business on social media, on a video call with The Straits Times, she says: “Basically, I’ve been learning silk weaving from the Taiwanese ‘National Living Treasure’.

“It’s something I don’t post about at all because it’s so personal and important to me.” 

Wu is referring to Huang Lan Ye, the ke si (or silk tapestry) authority officially designated by the Taiwanese government as the guardian of traditional Chinese silk weaving – the acme of textile art. 

In the last three years, she has studied intermittently under the master artisan, who knows nothing of the 31-year-old’s exploits in New York, making a name for herself as a clothier to pop culture’s avant-gardists.

While in Taipei, she also befriended a jade scholar at a jade market in the Da’an District and she earlier learnt Chinese knotting from another Taiwanese “aunty”.

This is all part of the secret, and protracted, “training” Wu says she must complete before she can take her namesake brand from side gig to a full-time operation. 

Under an eponymous label, her sexy and technically complex clothes have been worn by the likes of hyperpop pioneer Charli XCX, Grammy-winning experimentalist Solange Knowles and girl group member Lara Raj of Katseye. Actress Lily-Rose Depp even wore a lace minidress on HBO TV Series The Idol (2024). 

In 2025, Wu made youth magazine Dazed’s power list, the Dazed 100, for the world’s most exciting creatives. 

But Wu will not get ahead of herself. She always keeps a day job, which she also considers training. At the moment, she is a designer at voguish Los Angeles-based fashion brand Tank Air, purveyor of viral, waist-snatching US$75 (S$96) camisoles.

“I have a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes. (With) Tank Air, I’m training how to reach everybody, (produce things) that baddies want, that are of the zeitgeist. Then, on the other hand, I’m also into preserving old techniques,” she says. “It will all come together one day, but first, I need to spend years doing it.”

Radical tradition

The fruit of that oppositional regimen was on display at her New York Fashion Week debut presentation in September 2025.

The SS26 Carvings collection typified Wu’s world-clashing, haute Chinese approach: a metal-cast necklace modelled after burial jade, kinky cuffs derived from jade discs representing ancient cosmological beliefs and a leather dress with individual panels moulded to look like wood carvings inspired by a screen in Taiwan’s National Palace Museum. 

A balconette bra was fitted with 3D-sculpted carved jade discs. “Super traditional, super radical,” says Wu. 

Also, super challenging. There are 48 permutations for bra sizing, which meant Wu had to do many fittings, and the bleeding-edge work of 3D-sculpting had to be handled by an expert collaborator. 

The leather dress is a surgical assemblage of eight panels, each custom-moulded over 24 hours, dried, cut, then sewn together. Including the sculpting and designing, it took a month to complete. 

All this is par for the course for Wu, who once spent two years developing knee-high “gladiator” sandals made entirely of double butterfly knots.

Her project is to make “things that have never been seen”, she says. Hence, the winding path she is set on. 

She adds: “I feel like a lot of people are doing things in an institutional way. Step one is okay, you start the brand, then you put in like $100,000. Then, you pay to get this (trendy) model so that you can be considered like a real brand. 

“It’s like, babe, I have more significant, spiritually fulfilling things to do. I’m actually critically thinking about the significance of using this textile or that technique. I’m thinking, ‘What does it take for me to actually come up with something interesting and new?’”

A tale of two cities

In a National Day homecoming of sorts, Wu is holding her first Asia pop-up in Singapore on Aug 7 and 8 at multidisciplinary space Tokonoma.

The former Raffles Girls’ School student credits her 18 years in Singapore for her discipline and multicultural perspective. 

She had entered the elite school system after passing the Gifted Education Programme examination, an experience she politely calls “good training”.

“I was just doing me,” she says. Between cutting class, talking to people outside the “gated” circles and keeping her grades up, she also began making her own textiles. 

Then, sometime in her teens, she made her first dress for a school fashion show. “It was very Rodarte,” she says, referring to the high-romance luxury fashion brand whose designers costumed Black Swan (2010). 

In 2013, she left on scholarship for Parsons School of Design in New York, where she specialised in knitwear, partly because the discipline allows for total control beginning from fabric construction. 

For the last 13 years, she has kept up a steady stream of industry jobs, filling her resume with stints at the fashion capital’s biggest brands including Helmut Lang, Dion Lee, Alexander Wang and The Row.

She launched her brand in end-2020 with deshabille knitwear and dresses of deadstock lace. 

The “launch” amounted to posting work she was proud of on Instagram and calling herself a brand to get a visa, she confesses, after the Covid-19 pandemic cost her her full-time job at fashion supply chain firm Li & Fung.

No matter, as celebrity commissions began within her first year of launch and have not let up since. 

Materially, though, it changed nothing, she says. “The truth is, I was a young girl of, I don’t know, 25, with no family money to make a brand. What am I going to do after a big thing like that happens? I’m going to just keep working.”

Hustling in the busy metropole taught her “innovation, progressive ideas and culture”, she says. 

‘Taiwan is me’

Still, it is Taiwan that most stokes her imagination, proving a rich font of inspiration. 

At her New York Fashion Week presentation, Wu screened a documentary-style film on Taiwanese flower trucks that she made with Hawaii-born photographer Erika Kamano. 

These trucks are neon-lit, roving stages for raunchy pole dancers, sometimes hired to liven up religious events and funerals. In them, Wu sees a metaphor for her creative sensibility – a mix of the sacred and profane.

She says: “Sometimes, I feel like I’m destined to be Taiwanese because that’s basically me. I’m super traditional and into the old, but then there’s also all this radical s*** going on.”

There is a post-colonial edge to her love for Chinese aesthetics. “Chinese styles can be looked at like tourist shop trinkets, but if you put it in a high fashion context, then it becomes something else. So (what is radical about me) is my new idea of taste, of what is beautiful and worthy,” she says.

“Right now, it’s like only if French brands in Paris do something, then it’s valuable. I don’t need to move to France and work with French lace to show that I’m valuable. I can go to Taiwan where I’m from and learn silk weaving.”