CO U R S E S & C A REERS
Popular Asian Fashion Designers
Jimmy Choo [Malaysia]
Jimmy Choo Ltd.
Dato’ Jimmy Choo (OBE), born Choo Yeang Keat, is a Malaysian fashion designer based
in London. He is best known for co-founding Jimmy Choo Ltd that became known for
its handmade women’s shoes. He is perhaps the most notable of students in Fashion
Design (shoe craft) of Cordwainers Technical College in Hackney, England, from which he
graduated 1983. (The college is now part of the London College of Fashion at University
of the Arts London.) Choo has divulged that he worked part-time at restaurants and as
a cleaner at a shoe factory to help fund his college education. He obtained an Honorary
Fellowship by the University of the Arts London in 2011.
Akira Isogawa [Japan/Australia]
Akira
Akira Isogawa is one of Australia’s most prominent contemporary fashion designers.
Born in Kyoto in 1964, he immigrated to Australia in 1986, studying fashion at East
Sydney Technical College, drawing inspiration from contemporary Japanese design.
Isogawa opened a store in Woollahra, Sydney, in 1993. By the late 1990s, he was known
internationally. His clothes appear under his own label and are sold in many countries.
He is one of the few Australian designers to exhibit and sell his clothing in Paris. His
commercial fashion label, Akira, concentrates on women’s fashion.
Woo Young Mi (or Wooyoungmi) [Korea]
Wooyoungmi
Wooyoungmi was born in Seoul in 1959. Her father brought home decoration magazines,
which she studied without being able to read them. Wooyoungmi took up fashion studies
at Sung-kyun-kwan University in Seoul. Upon graduating in 1983 she won the Osaka
International Fashion Award. She has been shown on the Paris Menswear Week since 2002.
Architecture is what inspires Wooyoungmi. She draws many similarities between that field
of design and fashion: creating three-dimensional structures out of flat surfaces, sheltering
human bodies from the outer environment.
The outcome of such inspiration, combined with her love for human bodies and clean cuts,
is clothes made with respect and precision.
Such clothes are dedicated to the “contemporary man”, who appreciates the tradition of
high-quality tailoring, and also the new value of delicacy, in his clothes.
Sebastian Gunawan [Indonesia]
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