Vanda Fine Clothing
We gave up lucrative opportunities in the corporate world in pursuit of my passion for quality menswear and Diana’s love for handsewing and creation of beautiful clothing.
They say that if you find a job you love, you’ll never have to work a day in your life. Since we established the company, we have had time for little else except work and sleep, but we are definitely enjoying every moment of it.
The immense satisfaction we derive from crafting beautiful goods by hand is what keeps us going. We feel most accomplished when our customers are able to appreciate and understand the amount of work we put into each of our products, and most importantly, wear them proudly.
We are not a 100 year-old establishment deeply rooted in tradition, and neither do we pretend to be. We simply do what we love without compromise, and ultimately we hope our customers enjoy our products as much as we enjoy making them.
Alumni represent.
(Via)
Sonic Youth in Singapore, circa 1996
…And that’s my history tutor from junior college.
Apple is Worth More Than The Entire Economy of Singapore
GIC might have something to say about that.
Singapore is one of the wealthiest countries in the world owing to a government that is hyper-friendly towards business yet very strict on corruption.
The country boasts an astounding $70,000 GDP per capita rate and has been minting millionaires by the truckload despite the global economic turbulence of the last decade.
Singapore’s national GDP in 2016 is projected at $318 billion…and Apple is worth even more.
Not Being Born
by Li Xiu Qi, grand-daughter of Lee Kuan Yew
Not being born, I didn’t know
this time when Singapore boiled and bled.
Wasn’t spun around by waves
of war cries, strobe lights, sirens, silence,
shouting, nights with a jeep and
a loudhailer; didn’t meet
a man of steel nerves shuddering with sobs,
didn’t sit the rollercoaster of right and might, didn’t live
the cries, the tears, the whys, the fears.I didn’t know; I didn’t share;
I didn’t fight; I wasn’t there.
And so, although this is my land,
I only love it secondhand.
The Singapore River as a Psychogeographical Faultline
An exhibition by Debbie Ding.
Days of Reflection
“I’m reaching 87, trying to keep fit, presenting a vigorous figure, and it’s an effort, and is it worth the effort?” he said. “I laugh at myself trying to keep a bold front. It’s become my habit. I just carry on.”
HIS most difficult moments come at the end of each day, he said, as he sits by the bedside of his wife, Kwa Geok Choo, 89, who has been unable to move or speak for more than two years. She had been by his side, a confidante and counselor, since they were law students in London.
“She understands when I talk to her, which I do every night,” he said. “She keeps awake for me; I tell her about my day’s work, read her favorite poems.” He opened a big spreadsheet to show his reading list, books by , and as well as the sonnets of Shakespeare.
Lately, he said, he had been looking at Christian marriage vows and was drawn to the words: “To love, to hold and to cherish, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse till death do us part.”
“I told her, ‘I would try and keep you company for as long as I can.’ That’s life. She understood.” But he also said: “I’m not sure who’s going first, whether she or me.”
(Via NY Times)
Wow, did not realize that Hiroki Nakamura had graced our shores.
by Jing Quek, for 1000 Singapores
The Singapore Pavillion at this year’s Venice Biennale discusses Singapore as a model of the Compact City. If one Singapore is capable of housing 6.5m on 710 sqkm, then 1000 Singapores can house the entire world using only 0.5% of the Earth’s Land Area. This makes us a compelling model for the fast expanding cities of the world.
(Visit 1000 Singapores)
Drift by Antony Gormley, 2009, Marina Bay Sands
The Sugarflies - What About (off 1998’s ‘And That’s Why’)
The SugarFlies are the first ladies of local music.
The group consisting of June Koh and Stella Tan started in 1994 and lasted very much through the rest of the decade, changing the landscape of local music and more importantly challenged the stereotype of females in local music.
Melodies like Yoshiki, Wrong Again, Be My Baby and What About can still be heard occasionally on the play lists of Singaporeans that grew up in an era where music, like the world, was much simpler.
(Editor’s note: major schoolboy crush on Stella Tan)
Units of Separation by Magda Biernat
This photograph was taken in Singapore, where I photographed several apartment complexes. Visiting each floor, I documented the small personal items left outside of otherwise identical homes: bikes, shoes, shrines and drying laundry of all different colors. It was fascinating for me to see the ways the occupants had personalized their exterior spaces to separate themselves from other units. Apartment blocks became a worldwide phenomenon in the 1960′s as city planners cast off design based on human scale and began construction on a future of managed density. Units of Separation is an exploration of the way people maintain their individuality while being part of a collective and how units of space meant to foster communal harmony can actually threaten our sense of community. While a resident may come to know their immediate neighbor, it is possible they may never meet the person living directly above them.
(Via Verve Photo)
Banning Content Does Not Protect Us
by Audrey Wong, former artistic co-director of The Substation
I grew up in the 1980s, and came of age during the 1987 “Marxist conspiracy”. At
that point I was just beginning to get interested in debates on social and
political issues (inspired by General Paper reading and later, by taking
Political Science at the university). Suddenly I realised that commenting on
political developments in our nation could be a dangerous business. I well
remember the climate of fear in those days. There were half-jokes about certain
friends with a ‘file at the ISD’, and while a Masters student at NUS, it didn’t
seem very far-fetched for us to believe that the telephone in the Masters
students’ room was bugged.
So, speaking of spectres, I’ve never been able to forget those days of the late
1980s. The feeling of being constrained was very real. Then in 1993, the
performance art controversy over Josef Ng’s performance at Fifth Passage Gallery
erupted. When I started working at The Substation in 1996, every licence
application for every theatre show or exhibition was taken seriously. I was very
conscious if my name was on the licence. Taking calculated risks became part of
life. Years after 1993, I heard that Josef was still not allowed to ‘appear’ in
performance in public and realised that we are not a very forgiving society.
Another few years later, there was an interview with Josef in The Straits Times
and the arts people took it as a signal that he was finally ‘rehabilitated’.
It’s funny to get this cue from the newspaper, and if that’s so, then our
national newspaper can’t be a completely disinterested, objective organ of
truth, can it?
(Via well…Facebook)
