Each show season there are a handful of collections that the press are especially eager to see — the biggies, the established houses like Mulberry, Burberry and the high street meccas such as Whistles and Topshop. Occasionally, however, whispers swirl around about a new name to be watching out for. This season, one of those names is Ong-Oaj Pairam.
Pairam hails from Thailand, having grown up in a noodle factory owned by his Chinese-Thai family. Pairam would accompany his mother on trips to Europe, further fuelling his creative inspirations, before enrolling on a BA in fashion design at the University of Brighton. Career options quickly mushroomed, with Pairam going on to work for Roland Mouret and Proenza Schouler in New York. “It was a small set up when I was there, it had a genuine family feel and gave me the opportunity to work closely with creative directors Jack and Lazarro,” he explains. “I was captivated by how creatively New York women dressed even for a morning run.”
Pairam returned to London in November 2012 to launch his own label, making his debut during the S/S14 show season on the Vauxhall Fashion Scout, a fashion design platform that has nurtured the careers of Eudon Choi and David Koma, among others. Pairam’s A/W 2014 collection was also well received; he took his inspiration from Disney villains such as Ursula in The Little Mermaid (his favourite baddie) and offered a heavy focus on print. “Print and colour play an important role in the narrative of my collections,” he explains. “I approach design with a childhood curiosity and a dreamlike logic, and mixing print is becoming part of my signature.”
Silhouette is also key to Pairam’s look, perhaps due to his stint with Mouret, the ultimate constructer. “I quickly learnt that it’s a lot more difficult to make an elegant, simple dress than it is to create something that looks more complicated,” he says. “I got to work alongside some of the industry’s leading pattern cutters — it was hard at times, but it was a signature point in my development, which I am incredibly grateful for.” Women with curves will appreciate this silhouette conscious aesthetic, as Pairam often refers back to a 1950s shape, drawing on the architectural prowess of Dior’s New Look gowns. “I like to update and modernise these shapes, while staying true to the quality of detail in how they were made. Back then garments were crafted beautifully, something that I find is too often lost or short-cutted in modern-day manufacturing,” he says.
There will be many eyes on Pairam come this year’s London Fashion Week, and I suspect it won’t be long before we are seeing him join the main stage show schedule. His spring/summer 2015 collection is apparently set to draw on his Thai heritage for the first time. “I deliberately avoided it until recently, as I felt that as a Thai designer it was too obvious, but now that I feel I’ve developed a signature look and style, I believe I’m ready to approach my demon.”
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It’s not just me who wants to see how the little boy from a noodle factory has burgeoned into an accomplished designer and travelled back in time to tackle his roots — Pairam is also anxious to see the finished result. “Those first five breaths when the collection is finished and you can see it all together — that moment is worth everything.”
ong-oajpairam.com