Stitch by Stitch, Christian Le's Garments Celebrate the Beauty of Traditional Vietnamese Clothing

The screen-printing process proved particularly difficult for the Mermaid Gown, a structured black dress made from polyester mikado. Since the gold foil Le used was too delicate to apply before construction, he finished sewing the gown first and saved the printing for last. The challenge then lay in getting a structured, boned dress to lie flat on the table, an impossible task that left Le little choice but to screen-print directly onto the gown as it stood on the mannequin. “It’s quite tricky,” he says. “I had to hold the screen at a really weird angle, and sometimes the pattern didn’t really stay. So I had to pivot into a way to work with all the smear and all the messiness of the garment itself.”

Le’s use of screen printing gives the exhibition its title, though Folding Screens also looks beyond the process to the folding screens found in Vietnamese interiors. “If you go to Huế, in the center of Vietnam, you will see that all the gardens have a big folding screen in the front to block the evil energy coming in,” Le says.

Located along the Perfume River, Huế served as the imperial capital of the Nguyễn dynasty, the country’s last ruling house; its court shaped the clothing traditions that Le references throughout the collection. He is particularly interested in the loose, T-shaped construction that preceded the fitted áo dài, a long split-sided tunic worn over trousers and widely recognized today as a symbol of Vietnamese dress.

But there is a freedom in where Le now finds himself. With his creative life separate from the work that pays his bills, he can spend six months embroidering a single garment and another month knotting its tassels, simply because he wants to. He can return to the loose silhouettes of Nguyễn dynasty dress, teach himself techniques that take months to learn, and follow an interest well past the point where efficiency would tell him to stop.

Le is, nevertheless, circumspect about imbuing that work with a larger purpose. “I don’t think of myself as a hero who comes in and makes people care about the Vietnamese tradition,” he says. “I just want to do Vietnamese tradition, and if people like it or not, then I’m still doing it.”

Even if Le is reluctant to tell others what his work should mean, he knows what he would tell his younger self. “Fashion can be whatever you want it to be,” he says. “Don’t let anything dim your light for doing what you love.”

Jacqueline Huynh Young is a Vietnamese American artist and writer based in Los Angeles.