The Space I Occupy

I was supposed to be a designer. My parents had other ideas. Where I grew up, that ambition read as “too gay” for a son to chase. So I did the practical thing instead: graphic design, then digital marketing, then copywriting, then years buried in performance data, then styling. Four or five careers that all seemed, at the time, like detours.

They weren’t. WONGSO is what happens when you finally stop detouring and let every one of those skills point the same direction at once. The eye for image. The instinct for a hook. The obsession with what actually converts. The styling sense I’d been quietly practicing on myself for years. WONGSO isn’t a pivot. It’s the sum.

The name is half my own surname. Look it up and you’ll find something I didn’t expect when I first heard it: it means, roughly, the essence of being human. I like that more than I can explain. I live in chapters, each one a different version of who I was becoming, and this felt like the right name for the chapter where everything else finally added up.

It started properly in Bali, where I lived for three years. I used to watch women at the beach and at parties wearing the sheerest, most unapologetic things: lace over swimwear, nothing hidden, nothing apologized for. It made me ask the obvious question, why not men? That question is the whole design philosophy, if I’m honest. Everything I make stands on contrast: if the fabric leans feminine, the cut has to lean masculine. Lace, but structured like armor. Sheer, but cut with intent. I’m queer, and one of the actual gifts of that is not being obligated to any of the rules about what blue is for and what pink is for. You get to colour outside the lines. So I do.

I built the first pieces for an audience of one: me. I told myself that if the business failed, at least I’d end up with a genuinely beautiful wardrobe out of it. I was designing for the events I was already going to that year: Tomorrowland, Wonderfruit, Pride, one after another. I used to be heavier, and quieter than people expect. The wardrobe became the way in. I believe in peacocking, in wearing the one piece that gives a stranger a reason to say “wait, what is that.” That’s an opening, and I’m bad at making those on my own. New body, new confidence, same instinct. I don’t shrink to fit a box anymore. I occupy space. Some days I am the space. WONGSO, at its core, is for men who travel and want that same opening: the piece that turns a stranger into a conversation, and sometimes into family you chose rather than the one you were born into.

Every part of this is still one person. I design it, I source it, I write for it, I run the numbers on it, and I fit every “S” against my own body because it’s the only measurement I fully trust. That’s not a humblebrag; it’s a liability I’m aware of and working on.

I’m queer, publicly, without much hedging. It’s on my Instagram, and it’s on this page. I won’t pretend that’s risk-free. But building something this expressive, this unwilling to apologize for what it is, is itself the point. It’s not despite the risk. It’s the rebellion.

A proper portrait is coming. I want something artistically composed, not a straightforward headshot, and I don’t have the right image yet. This page will get one.