Brown Creatives’ Take On Singapore’s Inclusion Problem
One of Asia’s most culturally diverse cities, Singapore’s creative space has long grappled with systemic underrepresentation. But the city’s Brown youth is reclaiming their narrative.
ODYSSEY! : BLEEDING WOMAN ABOVE COUNTRY ROCK by Danial Mirza (Photo Courtesy of Danial Mirza @pappardile)
Singapore might not top the list when you think about fashion cities in Asia. A hub of commerce, finance, and technology, the city state’s cultural influence is often overshadowed by powerhouses like China, Japan, and South Korea. Fashion consumers, instead of creators, bring in $2.7 billion a year to the Lion City, as emerging creatives struggle to balance high rents and labour costs. Think the 170 shopping malls and the Louis Vuitton flagship in a gigantic floating crystal pavilion overlooking the iconic harbour.
However, with the rise of social media, the maturing of supportive initiatives, and the influence of other Asian youth culture, a new generation of creatives strives. These coincide with the efforts of fashion schools like Lasalle College of the Arts and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts to foster cutting-edge nurturing grounds.
The democratisation of creativity welcomed a culturally diversifying fashion ecosystem. The city itself prides itself on multiculturalism — 74.3 percent of the population is Chinese, 13.5 percent Malay and 9 percent Indian. While diversity is a fact, inclusion is a choice. A 2022 National University of Singapore report shows that about one-fifth of minority-race respondents reported unfair treatment at work due to their race.
“When I worked in this specific editorial house, there were Brown photographers but they were never made to do the covers,” said D, a fashion photographer, on the rife of tokenism. “They were always made to do spreads and most of the time these spreads weren't respected by the writers.” The 27-year-old photography graduate from Singapore Polytechnic has shot for Vogue Singapore and currently works in-house for an independent jewellery label. But he doesn’t quite feel like he was part of the fashion industry yet. “A lot of opportunities are from connections, these connections tend to be a certain kind of people, and this kind of people tend to be of a certain colour,” he added. He isn’t alone.
“ mentor once told me my actual name sounds too ‘Malay’ (the name is Javanese, not Malay) and therefore too ‘bridal’, and people wouldn’t perceive me as a cool designer with her own voice,”
“Representation is lacking a hundred percent,” said Putri Adif, a 26-year-old fashion designer of Indonesian, Indian, and Malay descent. When Adif isn’t styling celebrities or producing editorials for big-name publications, she is a creative fashion-cutting student at Lasalle who used to design under the alias Putri Pink. “A mentor once told me my actual name sounds too ‘Malay’ (the name is Javanese, not Malay) and therefore too ‘bridal’, and people wouldn’t perceive me as a cool designer with her own voice,” explained Adif. Without hesitation, she changed her name back to Putri Adif the same night. “I cannot lose my identity so I need to put my foot down.”
“Sometimes I’m unsure if it’s necessarily about being Brown, being a woman, or both.”
In reality, racial underrepresentation in the creative industry is multifaceted — it has to do with racial stereotypes and systematic barriers, but it can also be gendered. “I’ve worked at a creative agency with only one other brown woman and many other agencies I’ve worked with only hired men,” reminisced Manasi, a 24-year-old, Nanyang-trained graphic designer and photographer. “Sometimes I’m unsure if it’s necessarily about being Brown, being a woman, or both.” Although gender equity in Singapore has made significant growth over the past decade (the proportion of women in senior management nearly doubled), it might be a different case when race comes into the equation.
The beauty of a creative community in this era is that when you’re collectively denied a platform, you can create one among yourselves. And that’s exactly what Brown creatives in Singapore are doing.
“A lot of Singaporean fashion is Western, Japanese, and Korean-influenced, and then a lot of other works are more alternative, more in the Brown community,” observed D, who credits his community with countercultural creativity employed to preserve a part of their culture. “Indian and Malay people modernise their own traditional styles into their fashion.”
Erwinshah Hassan, a 27-year-old graphic designer and photographer, expressed similar sentiments. “The corporate things are more palatable to people in Singapore, I’m not in that equation — but I have a community that is there to support it and it feels good,” said Hassan, who collaborates with creatives like Adif, the Lasalle designer, on experimental shoots with other artistic vanguards like Malay singer Aisyah Aziz.
A youth-centered community space also helped Adif reconnect with her Javanese heritage which is less possible in Singapore’s more institutionalised or corporate spaces. Before one of her signature corsets got acquired by the city’s Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM), Adif made the first few of the collection at school. “Many lecturers were telling me what my collection should look like so it completely westernised and turned into something else, " explained Adif. “Then my friend came up to me and said he was thinking of doing our own fashion show and having all our friends come together.”
The result — Victorian corsets were reimagined with batik, a sophisticated Javanese dyeing technique, worn by models who performed a Javanese Bedhaya-inspired dance on the runway. One of which toured with the ACM to places like Busan and Seoul before returning to the museum’s permanent collection.
“The more I want to learn about my heritage, the more I want to connect the dots.” Like a majority of Brown youth in Singapore, Adif’s childhood was exposed almost solely to Western media. “I wished I spoke like a White person and had Western features, but when I turned 18, I started to question why I don’t like my skin colour and my culture.” Adif’s work-in-progress graduate collection, is inspired by her grandmother’s Javanese garments — the tudong, baju kurung, kebaya, and jewellery — but with 3D printing and experimental silhouettes. “My surroundings are telling me to lose this cultural identity, but I don't want to.”
On the other hand, photographer Danial Mirza mobilises his community to make social commentaries. In his series Odyssey, five Renaissance paintings were reinterpreted through photography with Brown models. “I’m positioning Brown people to the centre, in contrast to Singapore's media," explained Mirza. “Western art has ‘prestige’, so when you make that association the Brown-ness of the models becomes provocative.” Mirza explores the inherent contradictions within the privileges and racial harmony of Singaporean society.
“I was also inspired by the migrant workers in Singapore,” said the photographer. During the pandemic, low-skilled migrant workers accounted for almost 90% of the 60,000 cases confirmed in Singapore, which was largely attributed to a controversial lockdown policy that segregated overpopulated dormitories of 300,000 migrant workers to protect the rest of the city. “Even though these people had to die for us to bring attention, the country still didn’t do much to help them.”
In Mirza’s recreation of The Birth of Venus, a Brown woman takes the centre of the iconic Botticelli painting, with other characters hiding away from her instead of flocking towards her. “They try to sweep these incidents under the rug but this is my attempt to raise our voices.”
“A lot of people from my generation tend to be more progressive so there are many opportunities, but there is still a long way to go,” Mirza added on a more positive note. Manasi resonated, “I think as long as more young people are entering the creative force it will be much better, but that brings us to the question of how accessible the industry is to young people.”
Although Hassan is part of a supportive community of young creatives, he finds the market of his work still too small for him to be financially sustainable and he needs to balance creativity by taking part in the Singaporean corporate structure. “You still see the growth of inclusion, but it's still very limited.” However, he remains hopeful with his advice for young Brown Singaporean creatives who haven’t found their space. “Just be creatively, you. I have lost that creative side of myself and it took time to find it back. If you find anything that is not you, stick to your creative identity and just do you.”
Some names have been changed to protect the anonymity of the individuals involved upon their requests, citing possible censorship in the industry.
