Graduate portfolios | The LASALLE Show

About

Kayla Adelia is a creative pattern cutter driven by exploration, using intuition and experimentation to challenge conventional forms while weaving Indonesian cultural narratives into contemporary language.

Her practice is rooted in a curiosity about how garments can evolve beyond expected structures, often beginning with familiar silhouettes and pushing their boundaries to uncover new design iterations. Rather than treating conventional forms as fixed, Kayla approaches them as flexible frameworks open to reinterpretation and transformation.

Kayla's work engages with cultural narratives through themes of duality and transformation—exploring tensions between old and new, structure and fluidity and tradition and contemporary design. These opposing forces are brought into dialogue through a process that moves between draping-led experimentation and pattern-cutting refinement.

Through advanced draping, she uncovers unexpected forms and directions, which are then clarified and structured through pattern cutting, allowing intuition and precision to inform one another. In doing so, Kayla preserves Indonesian cultural narratives while translating them for contemporary outcomes.

At its core, her work positions pattern cutting not only as a technical skill but as a critical tool for creative inquiry and expression.

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DUAL

DUAL is a contemporary womenswear collection that investigates the tension between duplication and opposition through the folkloric persona of 'the doppelgänger', revealing how contradictory forces can coexist within identical forms.

Replication never produces a true replica, but instead generates subtle distortion and difference.

Central to DUAL is the exploration of old–new duality. Through the deconstruction of Western and Eastern classical garments, such as the kebaya and kain panjang, the collection reimagines and disrupts their familiar cultural and sartorial codes.

Within the collection, second-hand garments are combined with new fabrics, exploring how design and pattern cutting can give existing garments a renewed life and transformed identity.