Lalaismi Wai: the designer who took Macao label POURQUOI to Paris TRANOÏ

Lalaismi Wai (韋展尚) is a Macao fashion designer and founder of the personal label POURQUOI. Trained in fashion design at Shih Chien University (Kaohsiung) and ESMOD Beijing, she named the brand after the French word for "why" and built it around playful, detail-rich made-to-order womenswear. In 2016 she brought the label to TRANOÏ during Paris Fashion Week, and she was repeatedly selected for the Cultural Affairs Bureau's fashion sample-making subsidy — one of the figures carrying Macao's new-generation fashion design onto an international stage.

Named after the French word for "why," Lalaismi Wai stitches childlike play and imagination into womenswear — and carried it from Macao to TRANOÏ during Paris Fashion Week.

Lalaismi Wai (Wai Chin Seong) is a Macao fashion designer and founder of the personal label POURQUOI. She named the brand after the French pourquoi — "why," a child's favourite question — and turned playfulness, imagination and "little riddles hidden in the details" into a design language. Among Macao's new generation of womenswear designers, she is one of the few to have taken a local independent label onto a Paris Fashion Week trade show.

Profile

• Chinese Name: 韋展尚
• English / Brand Name: Lalaismi Wai (official English name Wai Chin Seong)
• Birth Year: No reliable public source (omitted)
• Region: Macao
• Domains: Culture · Business
• Industry: Fashion design · Made-to-order womenswear
• Profession: Fashion designer · Brand founder
• Affiliation: POURQUOI

Background

Wai studied fashion design and marketing at Shih Chien University's Kaohsiung campus in Taiwan, then took an advanced fashion design programme at ESMOD Beijing (2010–2012). Her graduation project "O LA LA" was selected for Beijing Fashion Week — an early signal of the personal label to come. Back in Macao she built POURQUOI mainly through a made-to-order model, gradually developing its style and clientele.

Career

I. Building POURQUOI

POURQUOI takes its name from the French for "why," with playfulness, free imagination and hidden details at its core. According to cultural-and-creative-industry records, the brand began informally around 2012 as an online made-to-order line, and was formally established as a personal label around 2016 (sources differ on the exact year, so both are noted here). Its output centres on womenswear, moving between avant-garde, whimsical and light-luxury registers, and later extended into childrenswear.