12 Jun 2025 2 min read

EPB Style Lab No. 2: Service Garment / Sacred Garment

Not in transit, not in service. Brooklyn, not Singapore. The kebaya lands far from its intended flightpath—worn not as brand iconography, but as memory, as apparition. A gift from Serin, the SIA stewardess. A relic of complicated fashion history.

✧ Not in Uniform

This isn’t a uniform. Not anymore.
It’s a relic—gifted, storied, worn in a place it was never meant to land.
The Singapore Airlines sarong kebaya, designed by Pierre Balmain in 1968, was never just fabric. It was brand architecture, colonial residue, gender performance, and cultural compression sewn into a single silhouette.
I didn’t wear it in service. I wore it in Brooklyn, decades later, on a rooftop. Not to fly—but to haunt.

✧ Pierre Balmain’s Discipline

Balmain’s design was a fusion of haute couture precision and cultural symbolism—tight tailoring from French hands wrapped around Southeast Asian batik.
The kebaya came to embody soft power: demure, elegant, always smiling.
Crew members underwent multiple fittings. The neckline was regulated. The hem calibrated. Even the fabric spoke of containment.

Balmain designed the SIA uniform in four colors, coded by rank:

Blue: Stewardess
Green: Leading Stewardess
Red: Chief Stewardess
Purple: In-flight Supervisor

Mine is blue. The entry point of a hierarchy I never joined.
It now reads less like a rank, more like a memory.

Singapore Airlines batik fabric swatches in blue, green, red, and purple, paired with corresponding ranks from flight stewardess to inflight manager. Each color marks a level in the airline's visible hierarchy — *Rank made visible. Singapore Airlines assigns color by crew status: blue for stewardess, green for leading stewardess, red for chief, purple for manager. Authority, embedded in print.*

Close portrait in blue kebaya, shadows soft across fabric and collarbone. Posture upright. Eyes off-frame. — *Blue for entry. Blue for echo. A garment cut for service now repositions itself in refusal.*

✧ The Style Lab Method: Rethread and Rearrange

EPB Style Lab doesn’t preserve garments. It disrupts them.
Uniforms are treated like collage: disassembled, reinterpreted, destabilized.
The kebaya doesn’t function here as nostalgia. It becomes strategy. Aesthetic residue. Embodied critique.

What was once costume becomes material archive.
What once promised compliance now offers its threads to another story.

The gift from Serin, the stewardess that was so kind to me for the 18 hour non stop flight from JFK to SGA —unexpected, precise—catalyzed this reworking.
To wear it is to both honor and interrupt.

Black and white photo of fashion designer Pierre Balmain fitting a Singapore Airlines stewardess uniform on a young woman, as another woman observes — Pierre Balmain adjusts the original Singapore Airlines uniform on a model in 1972. The French couturier’s design became an enduring symbol of “Asian grace”—a colonial fantasy tailored into global branding. Each uniform was tailored for each worker.

✧ The Afterlife of Uniform

The kebaya was never just fabric. It carried discipline, fantasy, labor—cut to fit a brand of femininity.

Now it circulates again: unfastened from service, reworn without instruction.
Not to reenact, but to rearrange. Not as homage, but as interruption.

The artist sits against a graffitied brick wall on a Brooklyn rooftop, wearing a vintage Singapore Airlines sarong kebaya set in blue and red, styled with a wide belt, red jewelry, and sandals. A lacquered red tiffin and teacup rest beside her. Sunlight and shadow animate the quiet composition. — *Grounded After Flight* *The uniform no longer signals service. Re-worn and re-situated, it becomes a second skin—one stitched with memory, defiance, and grace.*