This Singaporean fashion designer makes clothes to empower stroke survivors and those with limited mobility

Then came Cair Collective, a thesis project that she worked on with her schoolmate at Parsons, Amy Yu Chen, and her roommate, Julia Liao, who was an industrial designer. Designed for the same friend who does not have mobility of her arms, this collection provides a tech-assisted dressing experience in which clothing is made to “rise” onto the body with built-in inflatable components hidden in the garments.

Poh likens it to a “paradigm in which air is used to create a more automatic means of dressing oneself”. This idea might seem bizarre when applied in fashion, but is really no different from tech applications in other fields, such as the making of cars that drive themselves. “This process taught me to draw ideas and advancements from verticals outside of fashion to enhance our conditions of living,” she said.

The most ingenious piece in the collection is undoubtedly the inflatable skirt, as mentioned above, which conveniently connects to an air pump via magnets, and then inflates and becomes rigid so that the wearer could shift it over her hips, before tightening the waistline and releasing the air in the material.

“We had to improvise… we made the inflatable skirt using a mini iron, creating seams on vinyl by sandwiching the material between sheets of baking paper. We purchased inflatable mattresses on Amazon and cut out the air pump (component), while Julia helped us prototype 3D-printed nozzles,” revealed Poh.