Profile: Lieu Le – Only Natural Design Competitions

Lieu Le

Oslo National Academy of the Arts

Lieu Le (b. 1991, Hong Kong) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Oslo, whose work spans the fields of clothing, materiality, and performance. In spring 2024, she graduated from Oslo National Academy of the Arts with a Masters in Design, specializing in Clothing and Costume. Her creations delve into her Vietnamese heritage, interwoven with influences from Nordic and Asian cultures. Central to her work are the nuances of yellow, which narrate her personal journey of identity, belonging, and spirituality. Yellow serves as a visual manifestation of healing—both for herself and in the process of creating. It embodies her efforts to bring awareness to the body and material transformation, creating a space for mindfulness and growth. Le sees her artistic practice as a circular journey, involving various mindful stages of time-consuming practises, emphasizing the importance of preserving traditional handcraft, bridging between the past, present, and future. Her artistic research focuses on the interconnection between materiality, the body, and movement, with nature serving as a profound source of inspiration. Through performances and collaborations, Le invites audiences into her world to witness materiality and body transforming from one form to another. Her work has been exhibited in Norway at Kunstnernes Hus, Studio 17, Sorgenfri Gallery, and Collective Oslo, as well as in various galleries affiliated with the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her first overseas appearance was at the Marginal Art Fair in Fukushima, Japan, in January 2025. She has an upcoming solo-exhibition at Gamle Munch Kunsthall in Oslo in October 2025. With a background in fashion and dance, she holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fashion Design Womenswear from the London College of Fashion, where she graduated in 2015. She began her career as an intern at the luxury brand Victoria Beckham and subsequently worked as a designer for renowned international brands such as Rains, Fila, and Juicy Couture.

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Dancing in Tune with Oneself and Others

Category: Apparel

Competitions: Fashion Competition 2025

Dancing in Tune with Oneself and Others is a collection that reflects on how garments can embody mindfulness and mutual care—between body and cloth, maker and material, human and non-human. Through the use of discarded, donated, and overlooked materials, the collection reimagines waste as a site of quiet transformation. Each piece is composed of natural fibres and leftovers gathered directly from the surrounding environment: wool yarns from Norwegian factories, deadstock kimono silk from Japan, and dye materials like onion skins, coffee grounds, and unsellable flowers—either harvested personally or gifted by local florists, friends, and neighbours. These seemingly mundane materials form the quiet foundation of the collection, each carrying a story, a relationship, a trace of time and place. The entire collection is united by a palette of soft, shifting hues of yellow. Created entirely through natural dyeing processes, yellow becomes more than a colour—it becomes a practice, a language, and a form of healing. In the designer’s work, yellow is a deeply personal thread: a colour of light, warmth, energy, and emotional clarity. After experiencing burnout from the fast-paced demands of the fashion industry, yellow became a site of return—a way to reconnect with the self through slowness, softness, and care. Through repetition and dye work, yellow also becomes meditative—an ongoing rhythm of breath and reflection, offering space not only for the maker’s healing, but also for the viewer’s. Most garments are made with as little cutting as possible, preserving the original integrity of the textile. This gesture—of not interrupting the fabric more than necessary—honours the material’s life before and beyond the garment. Using Japanese shibori techniques, the textiles are shaped and sculpted through folding, binding, compressing—manipulating the fabric without erasure, allowing transformation through care, not force. The silhouettes are inspired by traditional Vietnamese garments such as the áo dài, áo yếm, and áo bà ba—offering a balance between structure and flow, intimacy and movement. These forms are quiet but intentional, creating space for the body to move freely while holding traces of cultural memory and ancestral rhythm. Dancing in Tune with Oneself and Others is a proposition for another way of making and being. It invites a rethinking of value—what we overlook, what we discard, what we choose to hold. It offers a slower, cyclical rhythm of creation and renewal, grounded in observation, gratitude, and return. The collection resists fast fashion’s urgency and excess, instead embracing impermanence, process, and the quiet relationships that bind us—between past and present, self and other, material and meaning.