From kampung to Golden Globes: How Malaysian label Khoon Hooi became a global occasion wear brand
CNA
From a kampung in Perak to the Golden Globes red carpet, Malaysian designer Lee Khoon Hooi reflects on three decades of building his independent occasion wear label, reinventing the qipao and expanding into the Middle East.
When CNA Lifestyle called Lee Khoon Hooi, he had just wrapped up a round of client appointments at his flagship boutique in Kuala Lumpur. There was no assistant screening the call, no hovering publicist.
The 54-year-old founder and designer of occasion wear label Khoon Hooi answered the call himself – warm, unhurried, fresh from the shop floor. Some of the women he had just seen, he later shared, had been dressing with him for more than two decades.
Nearly 30 years after founding his eponymous label, Lee remains resolutely hands-on. He still meets clients face-to-face. He still sketches. And he still thinks in five-year plans – a discipline that traces back to a small village in Perak, where a boy who loved to draw first began imagining a life in fashion.
Lee grew up in a kampung in Perak, with paddy fields stretching beyond his family home. Fashion, at first glance, felt distant from such pastoral rhythms.
But proximity to Penang meant Peranakan culture ran deep in the region – in the food, the rituals and in the way the women dressed. Though his family was not Peranakan, Lee remembered his paternal grandmother in her kebayas, carefully selecting fabrics and overseeing each piece’s making.
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