Experimental designer Vicky Tsang’s fantastical creations explore and reshape the boundaries between fashion and art, and between the physical and digital. Her surrealist pieces, through her label Gnastiy.com, which she founded with her design partner Yidi, push the possibilities of both fashion and 3D printing into wholly new realms. Looking as if they’ve been beamed down from another planet, and resembling a head-on collision between the physical and the digital made flesh, their pieces include sculpted metal corsets and bags, and coats and trousers in exaggerated silhouettes with a liquid-metal-like texture.

Her work captured the world’s attention after she won the grand prize at the prestigious Hong Kong Young Fashion Designers’ Contest (YDC) in 2022 for her collection Exhausting A Crowd. Since then, she has become a favourite of celebrities, with the likes of fashion forward film star Julia Fox wearing her pieces; she has even customised a 3D armour for a solo concert from Edan Lui from Hong Kong boyband Mirror.

Gnastiy.com is certainly ambitious in its manifesto. Rather than simply a fashion label, the founders describe it as a “cloud-based database to store societal memories” which is “dedicated to integrating technology and tradition and using fashion language to reveal the impact of modern technology on the contemporary environment”; while she has said that she wants to “blur the boundaries between the virtual and real worlds”. The pair only produce one collection a year, so they can free up sufficient time to conceptualise and create their remarkable work.