“I’ve gone through many iterations of myself,” Fitton explains. “I was a different person when I was in high school, then in university, then in my first corporate job—and I’m a different person today. Each version of myself was surrounded by different environments and different people. We like to think that we’re the same, but the experiences you’ve had over the years changes you, even if it’s just bit by bit. I wanted these eggs to represent the interconnectivity of all of that.”

Leaving his profession as an architect, co-finding Atelier Fitton, and then becoming a ceramicist, Fitton’s journey appears to be a continuous search for creativity. Not one to remain idle, the artist doesn't limit his practice to one medium, and instead continues to be exploratory when it comes to his process—if he gets into a creative slump, he just finds something else to do instead.

“When I was studying architecture, I specialised in tropical regionalism, which is understanding the climate, the surroundings, and then designing [architectural plans] according to that. But when I was an architect, I couldn’t help but find it lacking when it came to creative solutions. 

“Housing estates, office towers… we’d recycle a lot of the designs, which often boiled down to four characteristics: being big, modern, fancy and American. And yes, designing 600 houses, each considering the little details like where the sun sets and rises, the number of occupants, and the cultural nuances for the local demographics, is frankly a nightmare. But the point is, everyone cares less and less about the person buying the house they designed for.”

His first fashion label, Tempatan, became a creative leeway when it came to creating purposeful designs. And the thing that kick-started his career as a designer? A tee with the Tenaga Nasional Berhad’s safety signage.   

“Everyone of course knows it stands for danger because it’s in the language they understand,” he says. “But do we ever really notice the other languages written on the sign? And by extension, the people that speak said languages? Sure, it resonated with the younger crowd because it conveyed a sense of danger, but each shirt was accompanied by a pamphlet that detailed all the languages printed on the shirt. I didn’t just want a brand with an edge, I wanted a brand informed by culture.”

For Fitton, it is the process of ideation and construction that excites him the most. Simply ideating wasn’t enough, he explains, and says that it was the realisation of an idea made tangible that got him to pivot into fashion. There was always something new to learn, something that he could tinker at and experiment on—even if it meant failing.

Failure to the artist comes hand-in-hand with exploration; in one of his previous collections, titled Broken, his first-ever all-black collection, Fitton explains that it was a story of a man’s downward spiral in trying to keep up with the dizzyingly glamorous world of fashion. Playing with the transparency and the sheerness of the fabrics to represent the careful control of how people present themselves to others and the masks people wear for propriety’s sake.

“But I celebrate [the lowest points in life],” Fitton muses. “I would be a different person if I hadn’t, it’s a part of me now. Sure, it’s about the worst possible feeling in the world when you’re going through it, but when you get out of it eventually, you’ll look back at where you were then, and that’s amazing. You start believing that you can always do better tomorrow.

“Going through disappointments, heartbreak and loss… it’s all part of life. It’s beautiful. Because if you don’t go through it, you don’t know how good you have it until you’re made aware of the reality you’re in. And that’s what I want my work to represent: the celebration of life’s greatest and worst. This was how I found my space in [The] Zhongshan [Building], this was how I found where I belong, a place where the so-called social outcasts are celebrated for their differences. This was how I stopped caring about what others thought about my person or my work.” 

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