Date: Feb 26th 2014 3:46p.m.

Contributed by:
viva_la

May is, professionally, a fashion expert. She uses her knowledge of the entire fashion design process to teach young fashionistas how to conceptualize and produce their own designs at the Raffles Design Institute.

But May makes an important distinction between fashion and style: fashion is industrial and driven by business needs, while style is your personality, a means of being yourself. Her style icons are Issey Miyake and Vivienne Westwood.

May’s hobbies include painting and traveling. Her painting style is powerful, with strong brush strokes and bold colors, while her wardrobe represents the many different places she’s traveled to. Her sense of style portrays the tension between being both wild and elegant.

The tenants of May’s style philosophy include elegance, comfort and sustainability. She developed her style from a most unlikely place: her grandmother’s closet. May fondly recalls borrowing her grandmother’s high heels and jackets to wear for special occasions when she was in middle school. To this day, when May goes home to visit, her grandmother will pull out a new jacket and ask her: “Would you like to wear it? It will look good on you.”

May is wearing a black long-sleeved t-shirt from H&M, a scarf and green trousers with hand made Miao minority embroidery from Fenghuang, Hunan, earrings from a local designer in Xinjiang, and a bracelet from a local shop in Tibet.

Photographed by Ransom Wingo

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