Born in a refugee camp called Wat Tham Krabok, Thai Land, Chao Xiong came to the US in 2001 with her mother and 7 other siblings, she’s called St. Paul her home ever since then. Chao is a fashion designer whose work explores her culture; she reconstructs her traditional cultural attires into a different silhouette and sometimes tells a story through these pieces. One of Chao’s thrifted upcycle work for a fashion competition was featured in PUMP magazine in August 2023. When Chao started to compete in fashion competitions, and enroll in multiple fashion shows, whether it was well known or college fashion shows. This was when she realized she should get a degree.
My culture has always played a big part of my identity as a fashion designer. My collection showcases two different beautiful fabrics of my people. The hand embroidery with vibrant color threads to the lustrous silver plaid woven fabrics. Cross-stitch embroidery is a very common and popular embroidery style in my culture’s clothing, usually adorned with silver embellishments and accessories which you will see a lot of in my collection too. As a low-income first-generation immigrant, my family would shop at thrift stores a lot when I was younger, and now as the push for sustainability for clothes are on a rise, I like to curate my non-Hmong fabrics from second-hand or deadstock as much as possible. Most of my fabrics from this collection are secondhand, or thrifted, the fabrics originally being tablecloths, curtains, or cuts of fabrics from someone else’s project.