While much of the fashion industry today sells aspiration and aloofness, Leeann Huang swims against the current by combining the two things closest to her heart: food and clothes. The seed of her eponymous fashion label was planted when she created, in her words, “something unrelated to fashion” for her 2018 fashion design bachelor’s graduating collection at Central Saint Martins, an art school in London, England. “It was very much about the illusion of food,” says Huang, citing Japanese game shows where contestants take bites out of objects to determine whether they are made with food.
“I made knits that looked realistic, but made out of chocolate and jelly; I used oranges dipped in resin as decoration; and I made a lot of prints and embroideries based around food.” Born in Los Angeles in the US state of California to immigrant Taiwanese parents, Huang grew up spoiled for choice in a multicultural culinary environment where she had easy access to a variety of Asian and international cuisines. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be a chef, but that’s just because I loved eating,” she recalls.
“My parents would always joke that they never had to ‘teach me how to eat’.” Instead of looking up recipes, Huang found herself more intrigued by her mother and grandmother’s thrifty – and quintessentially Asian – practice of bringing well-designed garments to seamstresses, who would copy the clothes before returning them to stores. She was mesmerised by the .
