November 28, 2023 |
Call it manifesting. Call it a combination of obsession, natural talent, hard work, ambition, timing, luck, and circumstance. Such is the story of Bach Mai, who as a fashion-fanatic teenager from Houston, made clothes for his classmates and cousins while nurturing a serious fascination with John Galliano’s haute couture. Cut to years later, and Mai was working for Galliano himself, as his first assistant at Maison Margiela. In between, Mai studied at Parsons, interned at Oscar de la Renta – autumn/winter 2013, the season de la Renta opened his studio to Galliano – and earned his master’s degree from Paris’s Institut Français de la Mode.
“It was always my dream to go to Paris and study haute couture, then to come back and be an American designer,” Mai says. He moved to New York and launched his own collection in 2019, fuelled partly by a partnership with the French textile firm Hurel that grants access to fabrics like moiré libre, mirrored velvet lamé, and velvet jacquard, typically out of reach for young, independent designers. Mai’s silhouettes bear the influence of Galliano’s bias cuts, Balenciaga’s sculptural volume, and de la Renta’s flirtatious sophistication, filtered through a modern, digital-era, millennial lens.
The collection is couture aspirational. “I’m very adamant that it’s never called couture because I have such respect for that word and what it means,” Mai says. The spirit of the French canonic tradition is channeled through his pieces’ cuts and detailed construction, as well as the intimate relationship between the private client and designer. It’s also philosophical. Galliano imparted his pyramid view of fashion to Mai, with couture at the top as the creative laboratory that exists to push fashion as far as it can go while informing everything commercial that falls under it – shoes, bags, ready-to-wear, fragrance. Mai, who was nominated for last year’s CFDA American Emerging Designer of the Year award, will get there one day.
As much as Mai is influenced by the old school, his establishment heroes, and classical technique, he’s also interested in fashion as a vehicle of progress, change, and cultural reflection. He has used his runway to showcase diversity of size, gender, and ethnicity, making the decision earlier this year to change his standard sample size from 4-6 to 8-10 [UK sizing]. “One thing that was really important to me was to show curvy Asian models,” says Mai, who is Vietnamese American. “We champion all kinds of beauty but we so rarely get to see someone like myself, a curvaceous Asian person, being shown as the standard of beauty.”
Taken from Issue 1 of 10 Magazine USA – FASHION, ICON, DEVOTEE – on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
THE FAB FIVE: BACH MAI
Text JESSICA IREDALE
Photographer SOPHIA WILSON
Photographer’s assistant SHAM SCOTT
Production director JENNIFER BERK
