Maya Wang is Building an Inclusive [Fashion] Community Through Her Brand FRIED RICE

Designer Maya Wang didn't always know she would be at the helm of her own fashion brand. However, her brand FRIED RICE, which consists of genderless clothing pieces that aim to push something more than the latest fashion trends - and that is inclusive community. I had a chance to interview Maya about FRIED RICE, her commitment to diversity in fashion, and her love for the Lower East Side.

(Thumbnail Photo: FRIEDRICE_NYC Instagram)

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Can you tell our readers/followers about yourself? How did you get started in fashion?

Absolutely. I am delighted to connect with all of your readers!

Maybe the best place to start for both of those questions is that I am a completely self-taught designer. I don’t think I initially intended to get into fashion. I am generally just a curious person who likes to play around and tinker with things.  Sometimes that gets me into trouble and sometimes it leads to some amazing new opportunities.

My main obsession has always been textiles. By the time I was out of school and working in NYC, I had collected,[ahem] hoarded, this huge pile of fabrics. I can’t even describe how insane this mountain was. It took up about a quarter of my little Brooklyn studio apartment and 100% of my life!

I loved those fabrics so much. I was just afraid to do anything with them because I didn’t want to ruin them. Finally, I got the guts to pick up a home sewing machine at a Brooklyn store sale. I immediately started sewing and learning as I went along. At the time I was drinking a little whisky and listening to poet singers like Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen. I can still smell the heated plastic of the machine, as well as the oil, fabric and whiskey together. It was an incredible time of my life just staying up all night cutting and sewing, learning as I went.  

I am the kind of person that gets something deeper out of experiencing happiness and pain together, and that entire process was so intense in that way. Creating while learning, and that intimate connection to textiles, became such a pure way of expressing my feelings that I had never experienced in life.

At first, I was creating unique designs for friends. But then I suddenly started encountering people out in public asking me about what I or my friend was wearing. Some would ask if I could create something for them. I think because the designs were kind of different and funky, models, fashion bloggers, artists were all reaching out tome in this way. As time passed, the requests kept increasing and after a few years this started to evolve into what became FRIED RICE!

So maybe it wasn’t so much getting started in fashion as stepping onto a creative path that was so impactful to me and still continues today.

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The fashion industry is known for being rather insular. What, if any, challenges did you face establishing yourself in the space?

Yeah, that’s quite a question that could take days to share my experiences. To be honest, sometimes I wonder, if I knew what was ahead of me, would I have taken on this challenge and the risks the way that I did? But that’s the way these things must be earned right? I am not sure I would have willingly chosen the challenges, but I am grateful I went through them and survived to this point.

As someone who did not go to school for design, and who did not come up as a professional in the industry, I pretty much had to learn everything the hardest way possible. Not going to lie. It’s usually trained or experienced professionals, or “wealthy adventurers,” who take the leap into the fashion industry.

But my path has been completely DIY. I first learned to sew and design. Then I learned ways to sell to people, handle shipping, do customer service, basic business admin, the list goes on. I did this mostly alone with the support of a few until other good people started joining in along the way.

The deeper I got down this path, the more I realized I was moving toward trying to break into a fashion world that I was not a part of - like outside of it in every possible way. With any big challenge in my life, I naturally think there’s a way to solve the problem, like I can find the key, crack the code, find the clear path, or something like that. But in the end, to get to this stage it’s mostly been a matter of consistently putting in the time, dishing out an insane level of stubbornness, a ton of work, the incredible contribution of people who believed in and supported my FRIED RICE vision, and a helpful dose of hopeful naivety that got me to this point.  

So many times, this whole adventure very nearly self-destructed – running out of capital, misguided decisions, promises gone bad, and the whole COVID era stomping on any progress we had made at the time. I had to keep believing and just keep pushing big stones uphill. Sometimes, actually almost every time the end looks near, it’s that last little bit of effort when you’re exhausted, or that small amount of money that came in after working a few hours longer each day that makes the ultimate difference in surviving to the next stage.

Looking back now, to make it through the challenges of getting into the fashion space, I think we just ignored what the fashion industry supposedly required and created our own thing. Eventually the fashion industry just started to connect into the world I was creating for myself and the community around me. It was this community that supported FRIED RICE and has made the difference breaking through the challenges.

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Can you tell us more about what inspired the name of your brand FRIED RICE?

The FRIED RICE idea started out years ago as a kind of loving nickname for my neighborhood in the Lower East Side. My partner and I used to get off work and go for “roadie” walks around the Essex Street area near Seward Park (a “roadie” is a cocktail in a to-go cup). I have always felt that the Lower East Side was an amazing mix of diverse cultural, entrepreneurial and creative experiences. It’s a microcosm of the world to me. So, I used to joke that the neighborhood and people around us were all mixed up in a good way like “fried rice.”

On one walk, we even kind of randomly day-dreamed so specifically about how great it would be to create a streetwear brand that represented the diversity of perspectives and creative experiences like in our neighborhood. Streetwear is often so “local” right? Like hip-hop style from the Bronx or surf and skateboarding styles from LA. My sense of home is so spread out around the world and it seemed so unique and appealing to create a brand with a more global and multicultural perspective and DNA. That’s so much more emotionally inspiring and representative of the real world to me. That was way before I ever thought I would start a brand. But amazingly the joking around on Essex Street somehow manifested itself into FRIED RICE in the years that followed.  

So now I have this brand that has a mission to uplift creative community and to celebrate and support this diversity of creative and cultural perspectives here and around the world.

How is the Lower East Side of NYC embedded in the codes of your brand/designs?‍

The Lower East Side is one of the great melting pots of New York City and the world. There’s a dynamic energy that is rooted in the history of people coming here from everywhere to create new lives. So, it’s a natural microcosm of the diversity of creative and cultural experiences in urban life around the world.  

I was actually born in Northern China quite close to Russia and North Korea. From the time I was a really young child I was completely obsessed with the colors, textures, layers and visual imagery around me. Where I lived as a child was kind of the opposite of the calm symmetry and consistency of the US suburbs. Where I came from was extremely vibrant, chaotic, full of dense aromas, clashes of colors and textures, and the constantly pulsing industrial sounds of the city. So as someone who immigrated here to NYC almost two decades ago, in the sights, sounds and smells of the LES I felt at home almost immediately and found an easy connection with the chaotic, dynamic energy here.

I think from that perspective I always want to mix diverse, contrasting elements together and see what happens. The FRIED RICE aesthetic is all about mixing and mashing up unexpected, vibrant ingredients and finding a very wearable balance within that.

I like reimagining familiar things through the lens of that diversity of cultural and creative experiences. So, we end up with classic chinos reimagined as Southeast Asian style wrap pants, or silky summer shirts with distinctive patterns and asymmetric corduroy layers, or a fluffy camo streetwear coat remixed as a Turkish dolman-inspired piece.

Also from the LES creativity perspective, I like creating flexible styling details that allow the wearer to continue the creative process that I began as they continue to wear it into the future. So, I enjoy designing with fun details like straps, pull ties, waist bands, reversible elements and other details that let the person wearing the style transform it into their own distinctive look and change in different ways. I can’t even express how happy and excited it makes me to think that the pieces are always in a state of transformation in service to the creativity of the person who walked out of the shop with it.

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What other influences would you say are constant in your design aesthetic?

Textiles inspire me the most. I’m still obsessed after all these years of collecting fabrics and now creating styles with them. When I see great textiles, my heart literally starts pumping so fast I nearly have a heart attack.

Aside from that I am kind of inspired by everything around me. I often just sit somewhere in my downtown neighborhood and put myself into peoples’ shoes. I try to experience what they experience in my imagination. In doing that, there’s a blending of my experience and theirs in my mind. I imagine what I would want to create and wear if I was this hybrid, remixed experience of me and them combined.  

Also, music and culture are constant inspirations. I am always taking notes when I watch movies, documentaries and performances. When I first taught myself the basics of sewing and design, I was heavily listening to poet singers like Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen. That deep, intense mood was really inspiring to me.

For this upcoming fall collection, I have been listening to a crazy eclectic mix of hip-hop, punk, jazz and believe it or not Siberian and Mongolian throat singing music like Yat-Kha and others. This music puts me in a mind frame of creativity like nothing else. I think that intense Genghis Khan DNA is in my blood, probably literally. His people really got around and my ancestors are all pretty much from that region. Listening to the music of that part of the world music motivates me to conquer!

Architecture and engineering are an influence as well. I am obsessed with structure and maybe would have been an engineer or something like that with just a minor tweak to my life experience. Colors, shapes, layers, dimensions, the construction of things … I like to pull things apart to figure out what makes them tick, and then put them back together in my own way. That’s literally how I learned to sew and design. Putting things back together my own way might not be so good for being an engineer though!

Fashion is often thought of as frivolous, but there is a certain level of functionality present in your pieces. Is fashion or function more important to you when designing and why?

In my world fashion and functionality are not contradictory. I do like to think of “fashion” more as creativity, but for me in that sense they are the same. The two can be in harmony. I think in my processes I like to try to push the limits on creativity and then find a balance that is also very wearable. As a New Yorker, having your look stand out while also having a streetwise practicality is the ideal win-win right?

As the designer for an elevated streetwear brand, I like to play with this dichotomy a lot. We get recognition for putting out styles that are workwear and streetwear at heart, but have a kind of fun charisma and artistic element to them. I think that’s a very special characteristic of FRIED RICE that I am proud of from a creative perspective.

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How would you describe your customer/members of your community?

Wow this might be my favorite topic. Since the very beginning the people attracted to the FRIED RICE vision, the people who really naturally get it are the creative souls; people with creative aspirations and pathways. I think they find an emotional connection to the fun creativity, and the strong connection back to cultural and creative experiences. They appreciate both individuality and community at the highest level, simultaneously.

I think members of our community are not afraid to define and express themselves as unique, and seek to create meaning by telling their own story in their everyday actions.

I think one of the greatest things about our community is that it is defined by creative community rather than by tribal categories, cultural genres, localities or affinities. It’s truly a diverse mix of humans “all mixed up in a good way like fried rice.” This organic sense of creative community has us being worn one day by an impactful hip-hop artist like Kendrick Lamar, and then on another by Atom, the fierce female drummer of the Chinese indie band Hedgehog, and then at other times by incredibly talented chefs like the LES’s own “Mama Guava” Monique Cadavona or James Beard winner Chef Kwame Onwuachi.

Can you tell us about your latest collection? What was your inspiration and how did the collection come to fruition?

Yes absolutely. I am very excited about the coming AW23 collection. As always, the collection is completely genderless and is inspired by the creative community around us. For me that doesn’t change from collection to collection. That’s who we are.

As a self-taught designer I don’t really think in terms of thematic inspiration - like designing a collection inspired by the ocean and therefore most things are shades of blue and fringy fin details - I’m kind of making fun here but that kind of collection framing never made sense in my world. My collection inspirations are always very “FRIED RICE” in that they are all an eclectic mix of the sights, sounds, emotions, expressions, and distractions that are happening in the chaos of my NYC world throughout my design process. This is life to me.

This time around we have so many fun, crazy, wild details for the fall-winter collection. Some of my favorites are the 90’s wash denim done in our East Asian wrap pants style. I also love the set of psychedelic mushroom print kimono blazers we are releasing as a pre-fall capsule. Another super fun piece is our metallic denim trouser-jacket sets with jacket sleeves that zip off. They are insane and really charismatic. The fabric is stunning too. As an example of how I think about collection inspirations, the metallic denim sets were influenced by a trip down a vintage futurism and sci-fi rabbit hole. But when that was done, I began diving into something else just as fast as I had got into the last thing.

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Embracing difference is important to your work. Can you speak more about the brand’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion in fashion?

We exist at a time and place marked by a thick thread of xenophobia and bigotry. I am grateful that this brand and the good people that surround us are a kind of soothing salve in the world to that anger, fear and abuse. FRIED RICE is literally a metaphor for, and celebration of the diversity of experiences around us, and the personal experiences that exist within that. Like the actual dish fried rice, this community is all these distinctive ingredients mixed up in a way that become greater together than the parts alone.

This is how I see life and my interaction with people.  

I am an immigrant who came from a place of struggle and limited means. I am someone who would have never got past the challenges to bring this FRIED RICE idea to life without the community around me. I am someone who has lived on the outside looking in in so many ways. So, I believe in trying to see others with a sense of empathy, trying to place myself in the shoes of others.

Everybody on the FRIED RICE team comes from a similar perceptive and range of experiences, and therefore bring that to the table. Because of these experiences, we want to make what we do as inclusive as possible. We believe that we all connect in our will to create and achieve our creative aspirations.

The FRIED RICE idea at its core is simple comfort food – universal - food for the soul. I don’t like this idea in some parts of fashion of propping yourself up as superior to others because you bought a shirt or something like that. It’s silly and doesn’t make much sense to me. For me, it’s about sharing in the creative experience. It’s following the path of your creative intuitions, and finding your own way to support that of others. I want to build bridges for people to engage in what I think is most beautiful about fashion: experiencing this diverse array of creative adventures that are all interconnected in some way. And to have fun together, embracing and celebrating life along the way!

How do you see the brand growing in the future?

I want to see FRIED RICE continuing to grow here in the US and globally as an impactful facilitator, or a kind of “connector,” for creative community.

I truly believe that the FRIED RICE idea is something universal, and has already connected deeply with so many people around the world. Now for us it’s a matter of continuing to foster the connectivity of this community across borders. I want to keeping building ways for our people in places like Mumbai, London, Shanghai, and LA to experience authentically that they are one and the same community with their brothers and sisters in Brooklyn, Bangkok or Berlin.  

From a brand retail perspective, in addition to North America we are already growing quickly in Asia, and are focused in the coming year on expanding footholds in Europe and Australia.

So, reps and distributors reach out now!