BORN TO FROLIC

Born to Frolic begins with a double meaning held open: "outstanding in my field" — the idiom we perform daily, the literal place we forgot to return to. The collection refuses to choose. Both are true. Both are needed. Rooted in Singapore's culture of productivity-as-identity, it asks what remains when output is removed. The answer, it turns out, looks a lot like a field. Or a void deck. Or a reservoir park on a Tuesday.

The pastoral here is never pure — it's borrowed, imagined, assembled from what's around. Kampung-orange gingham, provision-shop checks, a good morning towel carried as a formal object. Things so familiar they

stopped being seen, until someone put them in a collection.

There is an irony at the heart of it: the field, site of the hardest labour, is also the place we go to exhale. The same landscape that demanded everything is the one we now fantasise about. Born to Frolic sits inside that contradiction and refuses to resolve it — wearing real grass and fake grass at the same time, photographic fields pressed flat onto fabric and layered over a body that is, for once, just standing there.
 

The clothes dress the body for both worlds simultaneously. Boleros that reference the arm guards of farm workers and the frozen air of Singapore office blocks. Bishop sleeves that mime the practical and perform the poetic. A collar that ties into a ribbon or a tie depending on how you look at it. This is the useless uniform — dressed for labour, built for leisure, optimised for nothing.

It has all the structure of workwear and none of the obligation.

Patchwork, visible repair, things stitched from what was already there.

Good enough can as closing argument.