Ashlyn, the quietly romantic New York label from a Yohji Yamamoto alumna

Rising talent, names to know: ‘Uprising’ is a monthly feature highlighting an energetic new vanguard of fashion talent, selected by the Wallpaper* style team.

Crib notes

Name: Ashlynn Park

Brand: Ashlyn

Alumnus of: Bunka Fashion College MA, Tokyo

City: New York, USA

Signature style: Modern, zero-waste wardrobe that marries the Japan school of technical design with the romance of Parisian savoir-faire.

Design philosophy

Ashlynn Park isn’t afraid to take her time. The Seoul-born, New York-based designer was in her forties when she launched her eponymous label, Ashlyn. She spent two years perfecting its debut collection in 2020, an offering of elegant, Japanese-inflected tailoring and quietly dramatic bustled dresses. Five years on, some pieces still take months to reach their final form, whether she’s sculpting the lines of a wool-and-silk taffeta coat or refining the rippled contours of a panniered jersey gown. Much like the persimmon – the orange fruit native to China that ripens through the darkness of winter, which inspired her A/W 2025 collection – Park is testament to the adage that patience can be bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

That patience, and years spent training under some of fashion’s most visionary designers, has seen Park’s brand arrive fully formed. The designer initially studied architecture in Seoul before switching to fashion design at Tokyo’s Bunka Fashion College, cutting her teeth under Yohji Yamamoto, then Alexander Wang after relocating to New York in 2011, and Raf Simons during his tenure at Calvin Klein in the late 2010s. Drawing on an early love of mathematics while asking herself what women actually want to wear, in her own brand, Park reaches for the radical technical invention of Japanese greats like Issey Miyake and the formal romance of Christian Dior, landing in a space entirely her own. The exacting beauty of her zero-waste wardrobe hasn’t gone unnoticed – earning her a place on the LVMH Prize shortlist in 2022 and seeing three designs taken into the permanent collection of the Met. Despite these achievements, as she speaks to us over video call in the days before her S/S 2026 show, there’s a sense she’s only just getting started.

‘Every season I’m building another chapter,’ says Park, backdropped by the light-filled New York studio where she leads her team with a focused hand, where a particular technique is dissected and played with until a collection takes form. For a designer that takes great pleasure in the mathematical challenges of garment construction, she speaks about her work with a surprising sense of poetry. ‘Last season, the story was about the persimmon – the rounded silhouette and how during the severe months, the fruits get sweeter and sweeter. The first season, the word was hibernation. I just came out into the world and started asking myself, What is it I’m looking for? What do I like? Who am I? My journey is all about why I like that detail, why I'm putting lines into something, or why I like a silhouette. It's all about discovering myself.’

We are meeting in the days before Park’s show at New York’s International Center of Photography (ICP), which will take place within a display of Iranian image-maker Sheida Soleimani’s work. This season, Park has taken the vessel as her theme, examining it as an object that is part of everyday life yet capable of holding sacred histories too. Using the curved shape of the Korean celadon (a traditional ceramic vase) as a starting point, dresses and skirts take on a buoyant roundedness, seamless knitwear is cut in shapes that subtly ‘bloom’ from the body, while contrasting elements of sharp tailoring offer a ‘dialogue between grace and edge’. Expressed in Ashlyn’s signature palette of black, white, and ivory punctuated by vivid shocks of reds and blues, the resulting collection is an effort of controlled beauty that displays Park’s deft ability to balance both skill and feeling.

‘It's an exciting moment to be showing at the ICP,’ says Park. ‘I chose Sheida Soleimani because her work is about the window – she's bringing up all her memories as an immigrant and all of her history through that window. My collection is about the vessel, which is a kind of container where I can put my memory, history and my personal identity and weave those memories into the collection.’ For Park, choosing a single word or theme provides boundaries to create within – constraints that often evolve into signature design techniques. Take her ‘puzzle’ process, where her studio members are tasked with inventing a shape from a square of fabric that can later be assembled into a garment’s silhouette. ‘Sometimes [working this way] is limiting, but it's allowed my team to be very harmonised. I can give clear guidance to everyone. We lived with that word, vessel, for almost three months. It's very powerful.’

Creating within constraints is, of course, a tenet of minimalism – a term that has often been used to describe Park’s designs, though she sees her work differently. ‘I'm actually a maximalist,’ she says. ‘At Yohji, I did all of the runway stuff and the finale dresses. I'm a very conceptual designer. I love to explore conceptual ideas, but at the end of the day, I have to throw up some questions – those constraints – like who is going to wear this and how can they enjoy this work, this art? Those questions may sound like they are limiting, but in the end, they aren’t. I want my clothing to have a life.’

This practical line of thinking has given Park’s clothes a wearability that has already earned her a fiercely devoted cult following. Between 60 and 90 per cent of her runway collections are made available for sale – a figure almost unheard of, given that only a fraction of runway looks by the majority of designers ever make it into women’s wardrobes. ‘The secret is refining conceptual ideas to be wearable pieces,’ she says. ‘But even if it looks very simple, to be honest, these are not everyday clothes. There’s something special in the clothing.’ Beyond the awards, Park’s greatest achievement is in this balance, out of which she has created a world where the contemporary woman – in all her guises – is equipped to feel her most powerful. ‘I don’t have a specific woman,’ she explains. ‘If they have a beautiful point of view and their own perspective on the clothing, they will naturally find a home in Ashlyn. I’m just adding another line or shaping just enough to lift her up a little bit higher. That is the key.’

In their words

‘In the beginning, I didn't know what I was doing. I just followed my gut. I hated that and realised I needed to organise my thought process into a kind of mechanism. That's why I keep building the design philosophy with a clear map of techniques. Often designers who have been around for ten years run out of ideas. For us, it’s the opposite. We keep adding another philosophy or design technique whenever we hit a limitation. We just literally open up the seams, start adding new pieces from the scraps. It becomes a certain shape, but the shape is always evolving through time. I take my time and I’m considering the integrity of the work rather than chasing trends. The biggest lesson I have learned in my career is to be patient.’

Where to buy

On her own website, ashlynnewyork.com