Singaporean designer Grace Ling talks sculptural designs, using fashion as armour, becoming a role model, conquering New York and dressing the likes of Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry and Julia Fox
The soft-spoken designer is known for her sculptural, avant-garde creations that have won the hearts of New York’s fashion set with their authenticity – and now she’s opening her first retail store
Soft-spoken and mindful – but far from diffident – designer Grace Ling has the wisdom and experience of a well-travelled soul, despite her demeanour. At just 27, the former model has come a long way from her hometown of Singapore to become one of the most exciting up-and-coming names on the New York Fashion Week calendar, with her eponymous brand of sexy-but-never-salacious designs calling to mind bold brat girl rather than demure doll.
Arriving in Hong Kong for the first time as one of Fashion Asia’s 10 Asian Designers to Watch, Ling sits down for our chat wearing an intimidatingly chic ensemble that sums up her no-nonsense approach to fashion. If there were ever any assumption of the girl next door being too naive to have main-character energy, Ling flips this notion on its head by making her a badass who suits up in head-to-toe black, hustles for a living – and maybe smokes a joint or two along the way.
“I started the brand as an armour,” Ling says of how her futuristic, forward-thinking fashion empire came to be. Unfiltered in attitude, she projects an image of sensuality and strength while wearing her brand’s signature, sharply cut woollen blazer, tightly cinched at the waist. I’m surprised by how subtle her voice sounds in contrast to when she begins speaking candidly about the vulnerabilities that inform that strength and, behind the coolly mysterious aura of it all, make up the essence of her brand.
Having admired Ling’s shows for many seasons, I’m familiar with the protective sphere in which she’s built her creative vision, which seems to posit a world where women are the sole survivors of some freakish apocalyptic disaster. This approach has spawned a wardrobe reimagining sheath dresses as shields and suits as suits of armour, scorched, then risen from the ashes.
“In the beginning, I did not realise that,” the designer muses. “I thought I was just doing whatever I want to wear. But probably two, three years in, I realised my garments were always designed to empower myself and in turn empower women who buy my clothes. Subconsciously, I just created designs where I protected myself.”
Some of Ling’s most celebrated designs – such as the sculpted corsets from her couture collections and the magnificent metal contraption of branch-perched birds that closed her New York spring/summer 2025 show, aptly titled Neanderthal – reveal as much about the human condition as they do the human body and form, but still leave plenty to the imagination, tugging on our most primal desires by juxtaposing them with our dystopian destiny.
