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Gloria Tso

“It’s a story of potluck, karaoke, gambling, smoking,” London-based designer Hung La muses as he leans back into the sofa on a recent stopover in Hong Kong. He looks relaxed, making himself at home somewhere far from home, reflecting on the mix of influences behind his hit menswear brand Lu’u Dan, the Vietnamese term for a “dangerous man” or “bad boy”. All that’s missing as La tells this story is a cigarette dangling from his mouth.
“I’ve come full circle in my life and career,” he says. “All the things I grew up embarrassed about, I’ve learned to appreciate. That’s how the community got together – late nights around bone broth [pho], lots of gambling. I rejected that. Now I look back, and that was so colourful, so beautiful, so rich.”

Maybe La feels most at home wherever he’s wearing his brand’s clothes. With their baggy fit and his mohawk, he still looks every bit the bad boy, though he ditched his earlier self-destructive lifestyle some time ago. He spent time in rehab in his early twenties, and has been sober ever since. La’s rebellious streak – both a result of and a response to his Vietnamese-American heritage – now lives on through Lu’u Dan. The Balenciaga and Celine veteran has conjured a visual aesthetic out of this story, like a moodboard of the Asian-American experience, complete with emotional turbulence. How he ultimately learned to look himself in the eye and even hold a mirror up to society is another story.

“I wasn’t OK in my own skin,” he says, referencing his misfit childhood and stuttering journey through fashion towards self-expression and ultimately, self-acceptance. “I didn’t like my identity. Growing up in high school, I was drug dealing – like teenage kids in America, that’s what you do.”
That identity so clearly informed Lu’u Dan’s output – bodacious bomber jackets, graphic prints and swaggering styles as easily seen in a Hong Kong gangster flick as on today’s streets – that it’s hard to imagine how its creative director ever felt out of place. But only someone who spent decades being othered – learning to carve out space for himself in an industry where, in La’s own words, few Asian kids survived – could offer up such a vision of Asian identity and rejection of Eurocentrism.

As La explains, “I went to school in Antwerp, Milan and New York” – all environments that offered little to no sartorial references to his own upbringing and culture. “I worked at big fashion houses, [realising the] visions of other people.” He also found success launching luxury womenswear brand Kwaidan Editions, which was shortlisted for an LVMH Prize, with his wife, Léa Dickely. “But I never worked around my identity.”
Fashion first functioned as a sort of escapism, allowing La to get as far away from his own life as possible, but the racial reckoning sparked by the 2020 murder of George Floyd, which saw protests sweep the United States, prompted reflection.
“I started to investigate my journey as an Asian creative in a predominantly Western, white male-centric ecosystem, and understand the power dynamics,” says La, who questioned why narratives such as his own went unseen in the fashion industry. “You can see very visibly at the top, there’s only a certain profile that is predominantly accepted by the powerful people who run these companies. … At LVMH, at Kering, there’s not a lot of diversity.”

It’s clear that what La spent his youth searching for – a sense of belonging and purpose – was within his grasp all along. He just had to let what he projected on the outside finally reflect who he was on the inside. “You can buy into brands and the aesthetic, the celebrity culture that follows,” he says. “But at this time, when it’s difficult for brands, you always look in the mirror and [ask], ‘Are my image and product aligning in a way that’s resonating?’”
Reconciling with his childhood memories laid the foundation for what would eventually become Lu’u Dan. Much of La’s renewed confidence in his culture stems from mining those rich experiences – “formative travelling years running around the streets of Hong Kong and Kowloon in the summertime”, he says, “getting dim sum with my dad” – for symbols, signatures and codes. “Before Vietnam [had fully opened up by] the mid-90s, that was the closest my parents felt they could get to the culture.”
La calls a collection of Lu’u Dan’s most popular items MSG – rebranding a stigmatised condiment commonly associated with Asian food, monosodium glutamate, as Most Selected Goods – and hosts fashion week parties inspired by late nights hitting the clubs and gorging on Chinese food with fellow Asian-Americans. In so doing, he’s transformed Lu’u Dan from a fashion brand into a movement for marginalised people as well as a manifesto – one that no longer speaks of a desire to be understood, but is rather a demand to be visible.

“It’s very Asian not to rock the boat, right? It’s very Asian to humbly stand in front of your work and not speak to power,” La notes. He pauses when asked why launching Lu’u Dan felt like the right moment and the right venture through which to finally speak out about the inequality he’s witnessed throughout his career. Do all Asian designers have a responsibility to do so? And how do you straddle the line between designer and activist?
La looks to friends like Willy Chavarria, the acclaimed and proudly Chicano New York-based designer, for answers. “When you’re able to empower a community and put them on a stage like he has,” he says, “people who have traditionally felt othered feel celebrated.” He wants to do the same for his “LD gang”, a term he uses affectionately without criminal undertones, but with an edge of naughtiness.
“I don’t know if it’s beneficial for me to talk about these things,” he muses. “I don’t know if it’s helping or hurting; if it furthers my business, furthers my career. I just know there are things that aren’t right. It’s not my job to make them right – but if I can shed a little bit of light, I’m happy.”

A sharp departure from La’s previous work (sleek, luxury womenswear for the aforementioned maisons), Lu’u Dan doesn’t trade in pleasantries. From jeans with draped detailing, to slouchy hoodies and puffer vests, the brand’s silhouettes take up space and announce their presence in an unapologetically loud way.
“I didn’t fit into the very polarising stereotypes of Asian identity – these very simplistic things – and I wanted to show an identity that was quite raw, like giving life to an outsider who’s been forgotten,” says La, who has spent a lifetime rebelling against the ideas of the “good Asian son”, or the spirit of a man always portrayed as nerdy and uncool in American media. “There were so many uncles – these Asian bad boys – who were so full of soul,” he remembers. Lu’u Dan is his tribute to them.
“In Asian culture, we’re always talking about duality – without light, there’s no darkness, and vice versa – yin and yang,” he adds. The sentiment captured by Lu’u Dan echoes the tortured romanticism, the heavily guarded vulnerability that makes Asian masculinity so multidimensional – and defined a whole generation of iconic characters in Asian cinema, from the lovesick cops of Chungking Express (1994) to the flawed “tough guys” in Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy (2002-05).

“The misunderstanding of the Asian male is that he’s [one-dimensional],” says La. “If you just want to buy a leather jacket and be a ‘bad boy’, fine – but I really appreciate it when people can see the nuance in my voice and personal story, and understand that there is complexity to all these characters. There’s beauty in the strangeness of how these stories have evolved.”
In case there is any doubt that Lu’u Dan is meant for more than just Asian men, La’s celebrity clientele should dispel it: Justin Bieber, Billie Eilish and Lewis Hamilton, among many others, wear the brand. Lu’u Dan’s popularity validates the need for more diverse narratives in fashion as well as La’s mantra that “specificity breeds universality” – proof that he is making some things right in the world, after all.

“I’m celebrating the ‘low’ culture: the grime, the grit, the crusty flavours,” he says. The daredevil in him hasn’t gone anywhere, but at least he’s finally comfortable in his own skin. “We have all the tools at our disposal to be the real true guardians of our own identity.
“How do you empower a minority? You give it space, water those seeds, let it flower. … That’s what feeds me. It’s my story, and nobody else can take it away from me.”


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Icons & Influencers

La’s misspent youth crystallised into a subversive style whose celebrity fans include Justin Bieber, Billie Eilish and Lewis Hamilton


La’s misspent youth crystallised into a subversive style whose celebrity fans include Justin Bieber, Billie Eilish and Lewis Hamilton.


Designer Hung La on the inspo behind his ‘bad boy’ brand Lu’u Dan

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}La’s misspent youth crystallised into a subversive style whose celebrity fans include Justin Bieber, Billie Eilish and Lewis Hamilton

La’s misspent youth crystallised into a subversive style whose celebrity fans include Justin Bieber, Billie Eilish and Lewis Hamilton