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Felicity Wong

Felicity Wong black and white image smiling with hands on hips, wearing jeans and a black vest

2024
Creative Writing. Art History. Philosophy Politics & Economics.

I didn’t grow up with a lot of clothes. My first-generation immigrant parents didn’t grow up with many either, and my alma mater of ten years required uniforms. So I mostly wore my cousin’s hand-me-downs, pleated skirts with stockings, and jeans from the consignment store. In the last three months, I’ve traveled to ten countries, which means packing light – I’ve learned how to build a capsule wardrobe, outfit repeat, layer, and thrift. My interest in fashion has been nurtured by a fascination for creativity within constraint. It’s why I write prose fiction – the challenge of telling a story about real ideas and emotions using imaginary worlds and complete sentences. And then my interest in fashion has been supplemented by the possibility of using business, sustainability, and philosophical perspectives to widen those constraints – to address questions about how to make “haute” art and literature more accessible, and how we can amplify the stories told in those arenas that subvert Western-biased cultural expectations. 

I find myself encountering stories about fashion everywhere: in old albums containing pictures of the fuschia cheongsam my mother wore at her wedding, in Virginia Woolf’s “The New Dress” and her insufferable, relatable, anxious Mabel, in the delicate brocade dresses and silicone feather garments at the 2016 Manus x Machina exhibition hosted by The Costume Institute (there’s another story in there about how art museums became exciting for the first time in my life, and how I haven’t looked back since), in the crafts shops selling handmade beaded purses in Kampala, in the galleries of Michiko Kon’s photography, where eyeballs and fish and feathers morph into handbags and high-heeled shoes. My love for literature and art and fashion cannot be separated from my career aspirations and heritage. It’s why it takes me two whole minutes to explain what I’m studying, and why I’ve spent so much time with NDIAS and its interdisciplinary opportunities during my time at Notre Dame. 

When I’m not writing and thinking about fashion, you can find me tracking the Joan Didion estate auction, consuming raw fish, skirt thrifting, and enjoying the color pink.