Jocelyn Nguyen-Bui

I stumbled onto marbling when I was playing tour guide to my sister and her family down in Huntington Beach. I'm a Silicon Valley girl that relocated to SoCal in 2011 for work and that's about all I did. I didn't have many passions or hobbies, though I've always loved the arts, I was never artistically inclined. Marbling made it easy to bring out the artist in me and I found a way to express it on silks to be made into our Vietnamese traditional dresses known as the AO DAI.

The Vietnamese ao dai has been transformed into many shapes and styles throughout the years, it's always kept it's consistent look of being a long tunic with side slits that goes up to the waistline, and is made to be worn with pants. No matter how wild and crazy designers get with different cuts and styles, the everyday woman would always default to the traditional long tunic for special occasions, events, uniforms, and any time they want to feel like a graceful, classic Vietnamese woman.

I've taken the traditional marbling techniques and added a few twists in order to make it my own for Vietnamese women. I do a lot of freehand work in addition to the traditional raking, but with fashion, nothing is absolute. I have used nothing but Dharma Trading's silks (mostly Habotai and Charmeuse), in addition to Dharma's detergent, and alum. The products are consistent and always produce the same results so it's very reassuring since I'm printing on at least 2 yards of very beautiful silks. I had originally intended the silks to be made into Vietnamese dresses, but once I started, I realized the sky is the limit. Whatever you want to make from them you can. Since they're just 42"x2 yd fabrics, you can make dresses, shirts, pillow cases...really the only limitation is what your imagination can make out of them.