The designer opens up about training under John Galliano, finding a medium between couture and ready-to-wear, and developing custom fabrics.
Texan-born, Paris-trained designer Bach Mai made a splash when he released his inaugural collection earlier this year; an elegant, ready-to-wear formal line with couture leanings. When we speak on Zoom in early December, Mai is sitting in front of a mood board of various experimental fabrics he’s developing with his fabric partner, Hurel. Like his fabrics, Mai is effervescent, waxing lyrical about his encyclopedic knowledge of fashion, his experience working under John Galliano, and bursting with excitement for the collections to come. In the below interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Bach Mai talks candidly about how Texas’s black-tie culture influenced his relationship with fashion.
Juno Kelly: So, you were born and raised in Houston, Texas. Did that have an influence on your work?
Bach Mai: Of course. Texas has such an ongoing relationship with event dressing, for a lot of kids in the U.S., prom is the big one and only. By the time we got to prom, there were years and years of formal events. There’s Cotillions and little dances. So having this very real connection to what girls really want to wear when they’re dressing up. And also, their mothers. I remember raiding through the closets of my friends’ mothers and learning about how they were dressing and what they liked and what they were responding to in different ways. I had one friend in particular, her mother was a much more buxom woman, she wasn’t able to try things on in the store. She would go to the trunk shows, she’d have relationships with all the different sales people, all these different designers. Just seeing this way of dressing and then this love and appreciation of clothes.
JK: Your parents are Vietnamese immigrants. Did that influence your work?
BM: When your parents are immigrants, it’s very easy to fall in love with fantasy. So when I was younger, the first time I saw those images from Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, the couture from the ‘50s, it was just a world so different from what I knew, what I was familiar with, from what my parents made me familiar with. It’s so enchanting because it’s such a dream. You fall in love with the fantasy of it all. I remember the first time I saw John Galliano’s work and it was just another world. Being this little gay boy growing up in the suburbs of Houston when YouTube didnt even exist yet, it was dial up. I was streaming the spring summer 2004 Egyptian show, and it was just so beyond anything I had ever seen. I fell in love with couture at that moment.
JK: Didn’t you later end up training under John Galliano?
Yes! So little did I know many years later I would end up becoming his first assistant and really getting to learn directly from him. When I was at Oscar De La Renta, John did a two week stint there. It was the first time I got to see his clothes in person. I remember the elevator doors opening, it was a week before the show and all these top models were waiting for their fitting with John dressed in his dresses and they were just unreal. To see them up close for the first time—the man is the man but the clothes are what I asked for. Then I saw on Women’s Wear Daily that John was at Maison Margiela and was hiring people. So I went to one of my contacts was like, “would you be able to send a recommendation?.” At the interview, Alex, his head designer at the time, hired me on the spot. John really took me under his wing and saw something in me and we got along great. And he loved that I had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of his work, for someone who had never met before and who he’d never worked with and who was barely alive [when the collections came out]. He would mention a reference from whatever show and I would be like, “I know the collection.” I was so lucky to have him take me under his wing.
JK: Hurel is your fabric partner, how does that relationship work?
BM: I’ve always loved fabrics. Even when I was in Texas when I was young my dad would drive me to the fabric store every weekend, and I would just spend all day there learning about fabrics. I think when Baptiste de Bermingham (Hurel’s managing director) met me he saw that as a designer I had so much knowledge about textiles, that made him feel much more secure and safe — that I could really take this partnership and make something really special out of it.
Hurel is really open to doing custom developments for me. If I have a dream of something they will help me make it happen. Hurel and I were able to develop the first fully recycled nylon tulle, at least to our knowledge, and I’m using it with flocking which is also made out of a recycled fibre. We’re also developing a clear lurex velvet.
JK: Would you describe yourself as a couture designer?
BM: What I’m trying to do now is figure out this new, modern hybrid. Fashion, retail, everything is having a reckoning right now. I think it’s time to look and build our own models. I don’t like to call my work haute couture just because I have such respect for what that term means. I wish I could say I had a couture atelier. It’s the dream one day, but it’s aspirationally couture and I try to take things from haute couture that have always mesmerised me, one of them being just that beautiful, intimate relationship between the designer and the client.
JK: How would you describe your clothes?
BM: It’s about this kind of glamour that’s very real. I reject this idea that women have to adopt masculine codes of dress to present themselves in a strong way. If you think about Madame de Pompadour, (Mai’s dream person, dead or alive, to dress) pink was so iconic—her pink bows, ribbons—these things are not signs of weakness and fragility. Femininity does not mean make it weak. It can be strong, it can be in itself, its own armour. And you think back about even these 18th century court ways of dressing like this is how much I think about how much space that they take these giants, they’re imposing in themselves these massive dresses.
JK: What’s next?
BM: : Keep growing! We’re doing a presentation at New York Fashion Week coming up in February. It’s gonna be a small intimate show and presentation, just some fun. My first sales campaign will be in February. And then we’ll start doing trunk shows, where I can see these women face to face and talk to them about my clothes and get their feedback to see what their needs are.
Images courtesy of Bach Mai
