Hiraeth

Creative Direction: Loan Hoang

Photographer: Huy Nguyen

MUA: Ngoc Le

Location: Hao Sy Phuong

Hiraeth is a Welsh word for a kind of homesickness that is a combination of longing, nostalgia, and yearning, for a home that you cannot return to, no longer exists, or maybe never was. It can also include grief or sadness for who or what you have lost, losses which make your “home” not the same as the one you remember.

Growing up as an immigrant in California, I've often wondered what it would be like, and who I would be now, if I had grown up in Vietnam. In California, I grew up with images of Spice Girls, Gwen Stefani, and Clueless as style icons. Where Asian brocade was only cool if you bought it from Limited Too. My girl friends would gather round in the dark to see if we could be "light as a feather" and "stiff as a board".

For this project, I played around with the thought of Little Saigon Loan in Saigon.