Video | Douglas Young of Hong Kong lifestyle store G.O.D. on the places that inspired his designs
One of Hong Kong’s creative pioneers wanders around a changing Sham Shui Po and Yau Ma Tei, and wonders whether it’s time for a change of leadership at brand he helped launch and has run for 20 years
Carrying a huge woven basket, wearing a backwards trucker cap, yellow flannel shorts, plimsolls and a panda and bamboo print shirt, Douglas Young cuts a colourful figure, even among the stalls of Sham Shui Po’s fabric market. The co-founder of lifestyle and fashion store Goods of Desire (G.O.D.) is taking us on a tour of his favourite Hong Kong neighbourhoods.
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One moment he’s inspecting colourful rolls of Hawaiian-print fabric propped against a wall and the next he’s pointing out rusting, sun-bleached Chinese signs jutting out haphazardly along the street.
“I find these signs really beautiful,” says Young, who was raised in the city’s middle-class Kowloon Tong district and moved to Britain at the age of 14, where he went on to study architecture. “Even if you can’t read Chinese you will be able to appreciate the graphics and typology.”
The classic Hong Kong signs have inspired many of the brand’s popular graphics since its early years. “There were so many before that they were all overlapping,” Young says. “But now, as the shops are closing, the area’s transformed lately because business has been going south, everything is changing.”
It’s been almost two decades since Young and his business partner Benjamin Lau founded the brand that celebrates Hong Kong culture. Among a mere handful of successful home-grown design brands, G.O.D. was one of the first to shine a light on authentic, working-class Hong Kong.
The city’s dense architectural mishmash has inspired their most famous and quirkiest products: tin letter boxes, housing estates, cha chaan teng and even cockroach prints adorn everything from underwear and flip flops to shower curtains and tableware. After so many years, hasn’t the local design hero ever run out of inspiration?
“That’s a question that people ask me the most and probably the question that I ask myself the most, too. But I can safely say, no. I was worried that I might run out of ideas, too, but it’s kind of like a momentum … the ideas follow each other, like a snowball [effect]. I can’t stop.”