( SS/23)
“Before traditions become stories, they were once ordinary moments shared between hands—until time, convenience, and silence slowly turned them into memories we no longer notice losing.
Some traditions do not disappear all at once—they fade quietly through the absence of repetition. Not through deliberate forgetting, but through changing routines, new technologies, and the gradual loss of gestures once embedded in everyday life.
This collection begins with a memory of napeni, a traditional Javanese ritual of cleaning rice by hand before cooking. Once shared daily between my mother and me, this ordinary act became something beyond preparation. It became a language of care expressed without words—a rhythm of hands, a moment of stillness, and a form of connection passed softly across generations. In those small repeated movements existed a way of learning, remembering, and belonging.
Performed using a woven bamboo tray called tampah, napeni transforms movement into ritual. Rice is gathered, separated, and allowed to move across the surface in quiet cycles.
The gesture appears simple, yet within it exists patience, attention, and inherited knowledge. What once occupied an everyday domestic space slowly becomes unfamiliar as convenience replaces process and traditions become increasingly invisible within contemporary life.
Material becomes memory throughout the collection. Beading echoes the movement and presence of rice grains, forming circular compositions that recall the shape of the tampah and create the illusion of rice suspended in motion. The hanging elements shift gently with the body, creating moments of flow and rhythm that resemble the scattering and settling of rice during napeni. Silk screen printing captures fragments of remembered gestures, turning memory into repeated visual traces, while spray dye introduces soft transitions and gradual disappearance—reflecting traditions that rarely vanish suddenly but instead dissolve quietly over time.
Rather than presenting tradition as something fixed in the past, this collection considers preservation as something living and continuously reinterpreted. Through an Asian perspective on sustainability, fashion becomes a space for cultural remembrance—not through resisting change, but through carrying rituals forward into new forms. The collection asks what remains when everyday practices disappear, and whether memory itself can become a material for preservation.
Because sometimes, what we inherit is not an object or a story—but the movement of hands that once taught us how to care.
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