The print designers carrying on Malaysia’s rich heritage of vibrant textile design

Sim’s prints come to life on cotton satin fabrics, and also on travel bags and microfibre towels, bringing a jolt of joyful colour into everyday life. She draws directly from references that will be familiar to all Malaysians: favourite foods, fantastic flowers and plants; even icons from our shared cultural festivals. This year saw a Santan Studio collection that romanticised the humble snake for Chinese New Year, and turned it into an object of romance and beauty. 

“When working on something as ‘unserious’ as laksa or kopi cups, I try to approach it with the same care I’d give a floral motif,” Sim shares. “I focus on clean line work, harmonious colour palettes, and balanced layouts. I want people to not only smile when they recognise the objects but also regard them as sophisticated design elements. My goal is to capture its beauty rather than turning them into caricatures.”

It’s the same for Elisa Bulte, the founder of Pantoum, whose hand-illustrated prints have a nostalgic, romantic quality to them. Bulte’s illustrations draw directly from her travels, transposing vintage postage stamps onto pyjamas; palm leaves onto toiletry bags. It’s Pantoum’s pyjamas that have earned Bulte a loyal following, her illustrations adorning sleepwear in sustainably sourced cotton and viscose, cast in vibrant shades that reflect our colourful Malaysian surrounds. 

Her first print was Toile de Malaya, a beautifully sentimental print that echoes the traditional French Toile de Jouy style, but recast with evocative hand-drawn illustrations of palm trees, elephants and Malaysian icons. Then there are the Explorers, a take on Victorian cameos, which tie together Bulte’s French and Malaysian influences and feature famous French personalities who have visited Malaya throughout history. “One of them is Henri Fauconnier, who is now the name of the Lycée Français. There are archaeologists and sociologists, such as Jeanne Cuisinier, who spent time in Kelantan, allowing her to speak Malay as well. And the elements around it are wood-carving elements or details I found in the old postcards, because I love collecting antiques.”

“I hope that the brand can manage to transport people a little,” Bulte says, working as she has done to capture the feeling of joyful discovery that comes with the best travel. “There’s this voyage-like feel, like they can be transported to Asia or elsewhere, depending on where the next collection goes. I like to say that my collections are a bit like travel journals or notebooks. So yeah, it can make them travel as well through the prints,” she says. “And of course, there's a sense of comfort and joy.” 

Joy is the defining principle of Cassey Gan’s work. “Print and colours are my passion, it’s the way I express myself and the inner child in me—fashion is just one of the mediums I use to channel that,” Cassey Gan, the designer behind her eponymous brand, tells us. “As a result, the brand has become something that is all about bringing happiness and joy to people through colours and prints.”

As chance would have it, print is a medium Gan stumbled into during university. “My tutors back in London saw my doodles in my sketch books and advised me to try doing prints. I took their advice and fell in love with it. I just feel that it’s such a therapeutic process designing my own prints!” Today, the prints form the backbone of each of Gan’s collections, informing the look, feel and form. “We usually have five to seven main prints, but each print will then have maybe eight different colours and three to four different scales. For series 20, we ended up having about 150 variations!”

Previous collections have taken inspiration from items as quotidian as vegetables (around the time Gan’s son started eating solids), although clouds are a frequent source of inspiration that Gan returns to. 

“Truly, inspiration is everywhere,” she says. “If I see a cloud shape that I really like, I’ll sketch it on my sketchbook, turn those sketches into digital form and then manipulate them on Illustrator or Photoshop. I then started adding colours, playing with scales, and repetition. This process is repeated many times until it ‘feels’ right. I have to rely on my gut feeling a lot on this! I can be inspired by a conversation with someone, a rubbish pile I see on the road, clouds or trees around me.” 

Inspiration is all around us. And how lucky we are to have that inspiration transmuted into tangible forms by designers—to have our clothes and our keepsakes as daily, physical reminders that life is colourful. 

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