Tan Yi-Ern Samuel

Samuel Tan studies clothing and dressmaking in postwar Japan and the emergence of contemporary Japanese Fashion. Located in the development of drawing, cutting, and sewing technologies/techniques in such institutions as Bunka Fukusō Gakuin, Samuel’s work concerns how dressmaking as a domestic, vocational, and femininely gendered form of work in the immediate postwar transforms into an aestheticized, professional, and male-dominated practice by the 1970s. He is particularly interested in the production of reception, for instance, in how Japanese fashion designers (much like artists) formed collectives as platforms for displaying their work—the precursor to contemporary Tokyo Fashion Week (today called Rakuten Fashion Week TOKYO). Samuel’s past research has examined the work of Miyake Design Studio between 1995 to 2007, with an interest in how the Studio deployed technical discourse in the domains of law and textile engineering to position Issey Miyake more proximately with the disciplines of art, unhyphenated design, and technology. Samuel holds an SMArchS in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a BA (Hons) in Architecture and MArch from the National University of Singapore (NUS), where he graduated with Highest Distinction as valedictorian of the 2021 cohort. He has presented his work at CAA, SAHGB, and the Technical University of Munich, and has published writings in Ardeth (2023), and Remote Practices: Architecture at a Distance (2022).