Daniela Monasterios Tan

Fluent in Spanish and English, Daniela is a research-based fashion designer, curator, researcher and a creative practitioner with nine years of regional and international work experience in the fashion industry. She is interested in both the materiality of fashion and production methods, as well as the semiology, political, sentimental, contextual and social aspects of Fashion. Her research finds its way into fashion collections, textile work, exhibitions, workshops and written research.

Her current interest in material culture studies led her to focus her MA thesis on practices of wear that until recently, have been ignored in fashion history writing. (In)Visible Mending proposed an examination of mending’s position in social history and as an aesthetic consideration that influenced experimental fashion from the 1980s.

Daniela co-founded Mash-Up in 2012 with LASALLE graduates Nat Ng and Shaf Amis’aabudin. The collective creates fashion collections that engage with sub-cultural and ethnic semiology and techniques, creating commercially viable items that are incorporated into the youth culture in Singapore. Fun, tongue-in-cheek and wearable, Mash-Up also created workshops and events that engaged mainly millennial customers and added to Singapore’s cultural landscape.