‘This is our time’: Singapore-born designer Prabal Gurung inspired by South-east Asia’s duality

SINGAPORE – Fashion designer Prabal Gurung, a vocal fan of the margins, sees in South-east Asia a winning balance of “reverence and reinvention”.

The region’s care for the past – what the 46-year-old Nepalese-American poeticises as “the ancestral story” – bound up with its urgency for modernity, is a constant source of inspiration, he says.

It is not conventional wisdom in the fashion capital of New York, where Gurung and his namesake label – worn by some of the world’s most recognisable women like Michelle Obama, Catherine, Princess of Wales and Kamala Harris – are based. But then, the Singapore-born designer still feels a kinship with the tropics.

He says: “The world is now having a conversation about the mix of West and East. That’s such a big part of our DNA, it is our way of being. And if we realise that and give into it, then with the Western world taking interest in ours, this is our time.

“This is how we can swim, how we can run.”

Gurung is speaking to The Straits Times at The Laurus hotel at Sentosa, after addressing an audience of 700 at local fashion publication Vogue Singapore’s annual Next In Vogue conference on Oct 16.

A lifetime has intervened since he first left the city-state at the age of four for Kathmandu in his family’s native Nepal, but he has a prodigious memory for the impressions of early childhood.

Going to the movies, his father bringing home paper dolls, playing with his sister’s clothes, his mum’s make-up, a little black T-shirt printed with a string of pearls that he felt at home in, Gurung rattles off the touchstones of his brief time in Singapore.

He says: “Even though I was a kid when we left, the funny thing about a place is you often remember the essence of it.”

Singapore struck him then as a modern country trying to find its own voice, influenced by a polyphonic mix of races, people and food.

A map of Gurung’s world

Place and provenance feel like particular concerns of Gurung’s.

In May, he published a memoir, Walk Like A Girl. It charts his brambled path to mainstream luxury stardom, through outsider status in an all-boys Catholic school in Nepal, a coming of age in India and the immigrant treatment in New York, where he moved to in 1999 to study fashion at Parsons School of Design.

In 2009, he debuted his first collections in the midst of a recession, smart but saucy cocktail frocks, adroitly draped in confident, graphic colours. These he pitched with some savvy as “clothes for the thinking man’s sex symbol”.

Right away, Hollywood actresses Rachel Weisz and Demi Moore placed orders, the first in a by-now extended line of starry clients.

He says: “The fact that I was born here, grew up in Nepal and lived in India is why I think I’ve been able to cut through the noise in the Western world. I wasn’t trying to fit in and do jeans and T-shirts, nor was I trying to make ethnic wear.”

In 2010, US first lady Obama cemented Gurung’s name when she attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, DC in one of his dresses – red, off-shoulder and, as Gurung writes in his book, specifically draped to resemble his mother’s sari.

His heritage is a gift and Nepal, where he lived till age 14 or 15, is his foundation, he says.

Growing up in Nepal, dubbed the Land of the Gods, gave him a rare sense of perspective.gave him a rare sense of perspective. Spending days in thin mountain air, once even skirting the Mount Everest base camp, made him realise how incredible the world was, how humble he was and the reality of mortality, he says.

Hence, his “courage to fail”.

But beneath the untouched quality of the land, he sensed the chaos of a country sandwiched between two giants, India and China. Might that paradox of “healing chaos” be paralleled in his clothes, often bright and eye-grabbing yet flattering and so gentle to the woman in them?

“Absolutely,” says Gurung.

The subtlety of Nepali gossip also shaped his idea of grace.

As a boy, he was always around aunts, mothers and grandmothers whose stories invariably started with fastidious recounts of what they were wearing or eating.

“A pink skirt, a red dress that was a little too tight… They would talk so vividly, I could imagine their entire day,” he says.

“Then somewhere in between, I understood they were really talking about their husbands having an affair, let’s say, or their neighbours doing this or that.”

One can observe this default tact and distaste for the shrill in the routine elegance of the well-cut dresses Gurung does best.

Into the now

His latest Spring/Summer 2026 collection, presented at New York Fashion Week in September, was another exercise in subtext. On the surface, it was a return to lovely, flowing dresses, but Gurung was also “calling out for the angels that walk among us”.

He titled it Angels In America, in a nod to American writer Tony Kushner’s 1991 play on the Aids crisis in the US, and staged the show in St Bartholomew’s Church, suggesting safe harbour.

He stitched the shape of Nepal’s trumpet flower, sometimes called Angel’s Trumpet, into the collection’s silhouettes and had trans model Colin Jones and actress Dominique Jackson walk the runway. Hints of the pink, blue and white of the trans pride flag were interspersed through the collection.

These were quiet but effective declarations.

Gurung says: “When the show ended, people were crying because they felt this connection.

“I feel like my job now, and every creative person’s, is to be smart enough to understand how to tell the story in the most graceful but impactful way.”

Place continues to influence him. He relishes the in-two-worlds feel of his New York life, where he has equal access to the mainstream and niche.

“Broadway and off-Broadway,” he says. “It fuels me.”

There, he has unlikely teachers, like a writer with a PhD whom Gurung goes to for conversations about creative rigour, and his niece, a student at Barnard College, who taught him that pedestal worship can be cloying for the women he so admires.

“I don’t want to sound too cool about it, but I’m always looking for the new and the next. Not necessarily next as in what is going to be big, but rather, who is creating a sound that we’ve never heard before?”

That Gurung is equally enamoured with the vast and ancient history of Nepal, one that by his own admission can make the conventions of the new world feel so young, is no contradiction.

In the tradition of South-east Asia, it boils down to a perfect balance of past and present.