Asai designer A Sai Ta: 'Everyone said I looked like an old art teacher'
Designer A Sai Ta has achieved cult acclaim for his use of Asian iconography at his brand Asai – Hot Wok tops, nunchuck handbags, clothes packaged in takeaway boxes – but for his first standalone show on the London Fashion Week schedule this weekend, the British-Chinese-Vietnamese designer did not want to play to type. “I feel like it’s important for a young brand at an early stage to show that they can do more than just what they’re known for,” he says.
Ta previously showed with the nonprofit designer showcasing scheme Fashion East at London Fashion Week in February 2017, alongside Charlotte Knowles and Supriya Lele. But where earlier collections tended towards statement pieces, a preview of his AW19 offering demonstrated Ta’s desire to create “a wardrobe of clothing”: double-breasted jackets, tailored trousers and peasant dresses in autumnal wools and heritage fabrics were overlaid with mud-evoking gold foil. There is a stronger focus on cut, layering and proportion that Ta traces back to his earliest days at Central St Martins. “When I was 20 until maybe 25, all I wore was women’s clothes,” he says. “Everyone used to say I looked like an old art teacher … smocks, and loose trousers, things like that. I always thought it was a lot more attractive seeing a woman all wrapped up.”
Ta cites August Sander’s portraits, British subcultures, Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s Bed-Ins, and the idea of an Earth-centric future as inspiration for this collection. While designing it, he says his guiding narrative was that of a woman who “ran away from London to the countryside … she went on this wild night out, and ended up in a country house.”
Fashion design was in Ta’s family from a young age. He grew up in Woolwich, south London, one of seven siblings. His mum is a seamstress and his was a fashion-conscious family; everyone had their own personal style, and Ta’s own teenage approach to dressing might go some way to explaining his ability to fuse cultures in his own work. “Growing up, I moved through so many different subcultures and friendship groups,” he says. “I naturally just became this hybrid of different things.”
From the age of 16 until he was 29, Ta worked on the shopfloors of stores from New Look to Liberty. Despite prestigious internships at both The Row and Yeezy, it is this period that he credits as his most formative, because he says it gave him an understanding of how women shop. “When I was at St Martins it was so much about ‘Who is your market?’ But I understood [from retail] that … a Comme [des Garçons] piece or a Prada piece can relate to so many people; you can’t specifically aim something at a market.”
It is perhaps this lack of cynicism or belief in box-ticking that has helped his brand to remain an open book. “I feel like in fashion there’s this whole thing of people not wanting to admit how much they love clothes, because it might seem a bit shallow,” says Ta. “I have no shame in saying: ‘I love clothes and I love fashion.’”
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