Asai: The London Designer Turning Urban Inspiration Into Fabulous Fashion

When young British designer, A Sai Ta (Asai), made his London Fashion Week debut with the Fashion East collective last season, it was to resounding acclaim: the homespun finesse of his tie-dye silks, shredded layers of overlocking and shrunken jackets simultaneously evocative of nineties Gaultier and modern London. So compelling were the form-fitting multi-coloured stretch tops that they went straight into a Selfridges pop-up, and subsequently sold out. This season, he will be presenting his second collection – again, through Fashion East – and so here we present a primer: the things you need to know about Asai.

A Sai Ta grew up in Woolwich, South London, and spent his teenage years between learning how to sew (his mother was a seamstress) and hanging around on the local estate with his staffie and his BMX. This bizarre dichotomy of hobbies visibly manifests in his work, which elevates urban inspiration through exacting techniques: distressed skirts are actually carefully hand-sewn, low-slung skirts tailored to sit just so.

Then, after finishing school, A Ta went on to hone his technical understanding of fashion at Yeezy and The Row, each which has fed in to how he works today. “They have completely different design processes, completely different audiences,” he says, “but at Yeezy I learnt the finer details of how to make the best hoodie and the best tracksuit bottoms, and at The Row I learned how to create the best wardrobe for women. I think I am trying to do the same thing: design pieces and make them really special. I’m doing biker jackets, bomber jackets, denim jackets – taking something so casual and making it fabulous. I’m kind of creating a world where upper and lower class mix.” Championed by the London's creative set – women like Claire Barrow and Reba Maybury – his pieces are both remarkably beautiful and remarkably wearable – his is an aesthetic which we are sure to see more of in coming seasons.

For his upcoming Spring/Summer 2018 collection, Asai explains that he is taking his extravagant fabrications and voluminous silhouettes to a new frontier – bigger, and better – alongside interrogating his Asian heritage (or rather, how his Asian heritage has been filtered through a Western lens). “I’ve been looking at the Hang dynasty, at footbinding, at Chinese imperial clothing – but how, in the Western world, those motifs and cultures have been exoticised,” he says. “So many motifs of Asia travel in the Western world, but don’t relate that much to the culture itself. Dragons, and pandas and things. This season, I’ve almost created an Asian culture based on western perspective. It’s like Chinese whispers.”