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 cut for freedom, not restriction. 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.

WONGSO’s construction philosophy, in one line: relaxed, billowy silhouettes that give you your own weather system. Most of what I make is cut loose on purpose, so it moves when you walk instead of sitting still on you. Before I got fit, I used layers the same way I use them now: not to hide, but to get noticed. Getting fit didn’t change the instinct. It just changed the question, from “how do I get noticed without my body” to “how do I show this new body without tipping into crass.” A cape catching wind on a night out answers that question better than anything tight ever could. It doesn’t show off. It just moves like it knows something. That’s the feeling I’m chasing every time: not loud, just regal.

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’m quieter than people expect, so 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. It actually works, consistently, not just for me. Strangers stop, mid-street, to say “nice clothes,” “nice colour.” Enough WONGSO customers have told me the exact same thing happens to them that I know it isn’t a fluke. 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.

The first collection was a mess, if I’m honest about it. I’d never built a garment or run a fashion business before, and it showed: patterns that didn’t repeat cleanly, fabric I hadn’t tested hard enough before committing to it. I come from years of operations and data work, not fashion, and the instinct I brought over was the only one that actually saved me: build the system before you need it. Every pattern WONGSO uses now is archived, numbered, and measured, so a piece from the first collection and a piece from this month are built the same disciplined way. It’s not glamorous. It’s the reason the good parts hold up.

I don’t know exactly where I am, or where this goes next. But I know this is where I’m supposed to be. I still enjoy the making. I don’t buy clothes for myself anymore. I design them. And the best part of any given week is still the same small thing: someone comes back and tells me a stranger stopped them to say the shirt was beautiful. That’s the whole business model, honestly. I build something I’d wear, and every so often it finds someone else who needed it too.

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. If simply existing is already a protest, then thriving is the testament.

The universe has a way of realizing your vision even when it’s running late. As long as you keep pushing.

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.