In a small town in the north, in the family of a tailor who worked with careful hands and wrote poetry, the household was waiting that night for a sixth child. One by one, they fell asleep waiting.

The father dreamt of a moon drifting low, down towards the earth. He woke, and slept again, and the image would not leave him. When his daughter's first cry finally came, he understood at once: that was her name.

They named her La Hằng, the drifting moon. It is the name this atelier still carries.

○  La Hằng, a moon that never touches the earth, yet comes near enough to warm it

She grew up surrounded by images, sound and light, by bodies moving to music. At twelve she entered the Vietnam School of Dance. Of six children, she was the only one her parents allowed to follow the arts.

But in the practice room her mind kept drifting to clothes. Dresses, jackets, imagined lengths of cloth moved along with the music. She sensed it early: in fashion she could reach more people than she ever would on a stage.

“Fashion followed my imagination wherever the music took it. I knew that was my road.”

In 1992 she opened her first workroom in a narrow lane of a Hanoi housing block. Two years later, when she showed traditional áo dài and evening wear in public for the first time, the press gave her a title: the designer La Hằng.

She took the title less as a compliment than as a debt. So she kept studying: a degree in fashion design from Hanoi Open University in 1999, then a course in the United States in 2000 on classical stage costume for the ballet and opera of national academy theatres.