Embodying My Roots: Reimagining Tradition for a Contemporary Identity
This work explores the designers' evolving relationship between cultural heritage, clothing, and sense of belonging as a diasporic globalized identity through the reconnection and reimagining of traditional Bhutanese dress.
At its center is the redesigned Toego, the traditional short jacket worn by Bhutanese women, inspired by the silhouette and tailoring of Western clothing structures. The results are 2 hybrid toegos that speak to the experience of living between cultures, seamlessly balancing tradition with one’s contemporary modern western style and aesthetics, reflecting the duality of the designer's experience grounded in ancestral history, but shaped by her modern, global life.
The jackets made in collaboration with Bhutanese tailors, connecting design with homeland craftsmanship, enabling a reconnection not only with Bhutanese material heritage but its society and modes of making.
The garment fastened with a self-made Thingkhab, an obsolete accessory once used by Bhutanese women as both an ornamental fastening pin and a defensive tool as a disguised weapon. Traditionally passed down from mother to daughter, the thingkhab was revived in this work using inherited Norbus (jewels). The turquoise, associated with powers of protection and healing in Bhutanese and Buddhist traditions set in the silhouette of her family crest.
Together, the toego and thingkhab function as a modern heirloom carrying memory, ancestral lineage, and cultural resilience. The project offers a quiet resistance to cultural loss, proposing that tradition is not fixed but can be embodied, reinterpreted, and worn as a living, evolving practice in abroad settings.
This project is the designers personal act of reconnection with her roots in Bhutan, but also an invitation to reconsider how cultural garments can evolve for one’s contemporary life while honouring its origins.