Born in Hanoi, growing up in Ho Chi Minh City, designer Kim Oanh Clark once had a fairly popular study and career path: studying at the University of Foreign Trade, working in marketing, getting married, and settling abroad with her husband. During that time, fashion was not an official career choice, but always existed as a long-term concern.
In 2013, when her family lived in the Philippines, Kim began to seriously switch to this field, studying at the Philippine Fashion Academy. From her graduation collection, her designs appeared in several fashion magazines in the region, marking an initial approach to a professional fashion environment.
In 2015, Kim returned to Melbourne (Australia) and attended RMIT University. In 2019, she graduated with a Master of Fashion Design and received the Australian Fashion Foundation Award. After that, Kim spent time studying and working in a fashion environment in New York, while teaching university fashion in Australia. Moving between different cultural spaces formed a design approach that was not closely linked to a specific location or market.
In her compositions, Kim does not focus on trend factors but follows the personal flow. One of the consistent sources of inspiration is family memories, especially the image of her father - a revolutionary cadre from the South who regrouped to the North from the 1950s. Stories associated with soldier life, military uniforms, parachute fabric, tents, and wartime living conditions have become a material of memory that influences her aesthetic thinking.
Since then, the "Memory" collection has been built as a research on memories and materials. Kim combines military materials with silk, velvet, applying laser cutting techniques, digital printing, creating a costume structure that is both functional and emotional. Personal memories are not expressed in a direct nostalgic direction, but are transformed into contemporary visual language, suitable for the international performance context.
In the "Overlapped" collection, Kim continues to exploit cultural intersection: floral motifs and Vietnamese wood carving techniques are incorporated into European costume shapes; traditional yếm is placed in modern costume structures. Traditional elements do not appear as illustrative symbols, but exist as a layer of cultural material in the overall design.
In Melbourne, Kim maintains a private workspace in the house, where she performs steps from sketching, staging, sewing to working with textile factories to develop materials. This process helps her control design structures and material quality, while maintaining consistency in creative language.
Kim's collections are not positioned in the direction of "national fashion" or "traditional fashion", but approach Vietnamese identity as a source of cultural thinking. Vietnamese memories, materials, and images are transformed into design structures suitable for international fashion space, instead of maintaining the traditional form of expression.
In the context of globalization, Kim Oanh Clark's journey shows a different approach to bringing Vietnamese fashion to the world: not by symbols, slogans or cultural labels, but by the process of transforming life experiences and personal memories into design language. Fashion, in this case, is not just an aesthetic product, but a form of cultural expression - where Vietnamese identity exists as a foundation of thinking, not a decorative element.
