Kim Nguyen makes clothes with a 'you only live once' mentality

Kim Nguyen describes the Vietnamese phrase ham chơi as something you might say to a little kid who plays too much. “Like, ‘you need to go do your homework, ham chơi !’”, she explains on a rainy afternoon in her Chinatown studio. It’s a phrase that Kim’s mum would often repeat to her dad, who liked to party. But it’s also a fitting introduction to the designer’s debut runway collection, presented on a cast of downtown New York’s fashion set who showcased the colourful low-rise crochet minis, bold logo T-shirts and downtown-skate-slash-nouveau-Vietnamese aesthetic that has quickly come to define her label. “My dad defines ham chơi as a way to describe someone with a ‘you only live once’ mentality, whereas my mom translates it to ‘someone who parties way too hard’”, Kim wrote in the show notes. “It’s very much the spirit of Nguyen Inc.”

Though technically Kim staged her first fashion show in her high school’s auditorium, sending her friends down the runway in upcycled garments to Aphex Twin, her first official show was a bit more intentional – but no less guerilla-style, and starring no fewer friends. A soundtrack noting all the different ways the designer’s name had been pronounced and mispronounced throughout her life played as people from her community – Eri Wakiyama, Paloma Elsesser and Richie Shazam – walked down Chinatown’s Centre Market Place.

From Mimi Zhu to Trisha Do, a cast of familiar faces, and bodies of all shapes and sizes, hit the pavement. Kim’s material of choice – upcycled T shirts – were manipulated into form-fitting, áo dài style tank dresses, striped corset minis and even a high-waisted, sequin skirt inspired by traditional indigenous dress, modelled by Xoai Pham and paired with a crocheted spider plushie. The crowd that had gathered — a collection of anyone and everyone in the downtown art scene, as well as writers, editors and stylists in the know — lined the street. As it concluded, they cheered Kim on; smiling and laughing, some even crying.

This community spirit is what led Kim to launch her fashion brand in the first place. Before Nguyen Inc came to be, she studied womenswear at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and designed for Marc Jacobs and Supreme, which combined her interest in subcultures, skateboarding, and music, in particular popular skate video soundtracks of the 90s and 00s. “Supreme was never on my radar growing up. I was always obsessed with high fashion and couture because that’s what I grew up looking at in magazines, but it ended up being the perfect place for me.”

“I felt like I could work there for a really long time,” she says now, which is why, a couple of years in, she had to call it quits. “I’d always wanted to do my own collection, have my own brand. I just felt like if I didn’t do it then, I didn’t know if I ever would. It was really scary and I didn’t have a single thing lined up, but I was like, I’m just gonna quit.” After all, you only live once.

From Kim’s studio on Canal Street, where she’s talking me through her first collection, you can see a landscape of Chinatown souvenir shops with their miniature New York licence plates, Statue of Liberty magnets and graphic tees touting The Sopranos’ Bada Bing! strip club alongside phrases like ‘New York Fucking City’. After leaving Supreme in 2019, Kim started collecting these sun-bleached tees, sewing up the sides and the back to mould them to the body’s curves, and printing graphics – like political slogans, or abstract phrases – on the front. With their sexy but sporty bodycon silhouettes, the tees quickly caught on – so much so that it was hard to keep up, encouraging her to push the bounds of the T-shirt into a full-on collection.

“REGARDLESS OF IF IT’S GOING TO MAKE ME TONS OF MONEY OR NOT, I NEED IT TO BE OUT THERE. I NEED TO TELL MY STORY.” KIM NGUYEN

Though Kim quit her job suddenly, she’d been dreaming of this moment her whole life. She grew up in a suburb of Houston called Bellaire — home to the third largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam. In the nail salon where her mother worked, she cured her boredom by flipping through the salon’s glossy fashion magazines and sketching dresses that she’d then try to sell to her mum’s clients. “My mom’s super fashionable — I think that’s probably the reason why she started doing nails when she came to America,” Kim says, adding that she’d often go with her mum to beauty supply stores to stock up on brightly coloured acrylics, the large jars of powder lining the store shelves. “I think it was around eight years old when I just decided that I would start sketching dresses. And it was always the same sexy gown silhouette.”

With these early sketches and her younger self in mind, Kim still aims to make everyone that she designs for — whether friends or strangers — feel confident in her clothes. For SS23, she worked closely with all the models to make sure they not only looked good, but felt it too. Colour remains important to her as well, as a tool to reflect upon her journey as a designer. The collection was divided into three sections. The first, comprised of all white garments, represented the beginning, a clean slate; the middle, full of punchy colour in an ode to eternal style icons like Karen O and The Distillers’ Brody Dalle; and finally, black, which holds space for everything going in the world while hinting at what’s to come.

“I’m trying to do something that feels elevated but not pretentious, and still palatable in a way that if my fourteen-year-old self saw it, she would be able to understand it and relate to it. It’s really important for me to make something beautiful, but also have it be attainable,” Kim explains, adding that she has no plans of slowing down. “As long as people feel there’s a need, I’m going to keep doing it. Regardless of if it’s going to make me tons of money or not, I need it to be out there. I need to tell my story.”