‘The ocean is a constant’: Hong Kong fashion designer drawn to the sea

“The ocean has been a constant presence in my life,” she says. So when it came time for the young designer, now a graduate of the Parsons School of Design in New York, to create her thesis collection, the ocean was a natural inspiration.

The collection, named Whispers in the Current, went on to win awards at the 2023 International Design Awards and Muse Design Awards, and led Malhotra to be recognised as one of 46 fashion future graduates by the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) last year.

If the ocean was the designer’s first love, fashion and art would be her second. As a child, she took up drawing and oil painting, and as a teenager she revelled in perusing Hong Kong art fairs like Art Basel and Art Central, as well as the numerous galleries in Central.

“That fostered my appreciation for art as a visual language and a visual tool – just growing up in a place that was so appreciative of it,” she says.

At the time, Malhotra had begun watching the fashion design reality competition Project Runway, which led her to request a sewing machine as her present for her 10th birthday.

By the time she was in Year Seven at Island School, she knew she wanted to work in fashion.

“Our [teacher] told us that we were going to make time capsules, so we had to write a letter to our graduating self in Year 13,” she says. “In that, I said that I wanted to be a fashion designer. She told me to be more specific, so I Googled the best fashion school, and I wrote [that I would attend] the first one, which was Parsons.”

Fast forward six years – during which Malhotra designed for multiple student fashion shows and honed her skills through upcycling fashion and wearable art classes – and she indeed found herself with an acceptance letter from Parsons, the only college she ended up applying to.

So off she went to New York – yet another coastal city – where she majored in fashion design.

At Parsons, Malhotra was able to expand her understanding of how to design, especially during her pattern-making classes, where professors challenged her to explore different design processes.

“Normally, when you’re making a garment, you will start with something called a sloper, which is a basic block of a sleeve, bodice or a pant leg,” she says. “But they reframed my thinking, where you don’t have to start with that. Because if you start with that, chances are that your garment is going to look like someone else’s garment, because you’re starting from the same place.

“They encouraged you to think about clothing or pieces as just shapes, and you just play with volume and body [like] you’re building a sculpture, almost. That’s something that I still incorporate into my work today.”

The collection was born from Malhotra’s realisation that she has always lived in coastal cities. “It came up in conversation about landlocked cities or something, and I was like, ‘Oh, I can’t ever imagine myself living there because I always had the river, the sea or the harbour nearby’.”

She was drawn to old postcards that she bought at a flea market, showing people in Massachusetts swimming in a harbour, on a boat or otherwise just enjoying their seaside towns.

“I started to think more about what the ocean meant for me,” she says. “I was sitting on the ferry in New York, reflecting about this over and over again in my mind.”

As she started thinking about her diving experiences in Hong Kong, and the role the ocean played in her life and the lives of the people in the postcards, she saw how the sea encompassed so many layers and complexities that begged to be explored.

“It’s been a constant presence, which is a comforting thing for me, but it’s also a place of fear,” she says. “Sometimes you don’t know what’s out there and it’s scary. It’s [about] exploring how that sort of a grey area can exist, how these two things can exist and overlap.”

A pair of pants she designed, for example, features a combination of four different fabrics. “It’s about mixing all of these different elements to show how the ocean is this multifaceted place in the sense of the ecosystem, but also in the sense that it can ignite these two opposing feelings for people,” Malhotra says.

When designing the pants, she also used curved lines which were derived from satellite images in the Nasa Earth Observatory’s archive.

Her designs also feature “half-on, half-off” silhouettes, which physically reflect how scuba divers take off the top portion of their wetsuit between dives while also emulating the feeling of being on the precipice of comfort and fear – something that everyone, scuba diver or not, can relate to.

As for the prints used on her pieces, she was inspired by underwater caves and how light permeates water. The bags in her looks were designed by a friend, Christian Olarte, and were made using second-hand wetsuits.

During her creative process, Malhotra also referenced a book called The Hidden Messages in Water by Masaru Emoto. “A quote from the book is: ‘Water has the ability to copy and memorise information’, which I just thought was so powerful. ‘Water circulates around the globe, flowing through our bodies and spreading to the rest of the world.’

“It’s this idea of how water connects everyone and everything and every being. It holds memories. It’s present, future and past, all in one. I just thought it was such a beautiful, but also slightly overwhelming feeling,” she says.

As such, one of the long skirts she designed features two layers of fabric irregularly fused together with a third layer of melted, thin glue. The resulting effect symbolises the feeling of grasping a moment.

Although Malhotra has now graduated from Parsons, she has continued to expand upon her Whispers in the Current collection. In September 2023, she released a ready-to-wear capsule extension with seven looks that embody the varying colours and fluidity of the ocean.

The designer has worked for the past year in New York as a design and marketing assistant for Emmelle Design. She hopes to continue making more collections that embody her signature style – soft curves and fluid silhouettes – while also resonating with people from various walks of life.

“Growing up in Hong Kong really highlighted how people are more similar than they are different,” she says. “I want to use fashion as a tool to highlight shared human experiences – experiences that go beyond your race or ethnicity, but [are] just something that everyone can relate to, even people across generations.”