Designer Hung La on the inspo behind his ‘bad boy’ brand Lu’u Dan
La’s misspent youth crystallised into a subversive style whose celebrity fans include Justin Bieber, Billie Eilish and Lewis Hamilton
“I’ve come full circle in my life and career,” he says. “All the things I grew up embarrassed about, I’ve learned to appreciate. That’s how the community got together – late nights around bone broth [pho], lots of gambling. I rejected that. Now I look back, and that was so colourful, so beautiful, so rich.”
“I wasn’t OK in my own skin,” he says, referencing his misfit childhood and stuttering journey through fashion towards self-expression and ultimately, self-acceptance. “I didn’t like my identity. Growing up in high school, I was drug dealing – like teenage kids in America, that’s what you do.”
That identity so clearly informed Lu’u Dan’s output – bodacious bomber jackets, graphic prints and swaggering styles as easily seen in a Hong Kong gangster flick as on today’s streets – that it’s hard to imagine how its creative director ever felt out of place. But only someone who spent decades being othered – learning to carve out space for himself in an industry where, in La’s own words, few Asian kids survived – could offer up such a vision of Asian identity and rejection of Eurocentrism.
Fashion first functioned as a sort of escapism, allowing La to get as far away from his own life as possible, but the racial reckoning sparked by the 2020 murder of George Floyd, which saw protests sweep the United States, prompted reflection.
“I started to investigate my journey as an Asian creative in a predominantly Western, white male-centric ecosystem, and understand the power dynamics,” says La, who questioned why narratives such as his own went unseen in the fashion industry. “You can see very visibly at the top, there’s only a certain profile that is predominantly accepted by the powerful people who run these companies. … At LVMH, at Kering, there’s not a lot of diversity.”