Creasian Design Inc.
Wendy Li
Advisor: Sarah Ibrahim
CREASIAN DESIGN INC. explores how 1990s nostalgia shapes cultural memory and identity between East and West. Through fashion, artifacts, and digital experiences, it reframes American imagery through a Chinese diasporic lens—asking what it means to remember, belong, and design from the in-between. It’s a study of perception, reinvention, and the power of cross-cultural storytelling.
Project Description
CREASIAN DESIGN INC.
Retro is now. Capture. Create. Connect.
CREASIAN DESIGN INC. is a fashion and visual research project that explores how design can mediate memory, identity, and perception across cultures. Set against the backdrop of the 1990s—a decade when both China and the U.S. entered the digital era—the project looks at how cultural imagination was shaped by media, technology, and distant glimpses of “the other.”
The project reinterprets American preppy and nautical aesthetics through an East Asian diasporic lens, not to replicate the past, but to reframe it. Garments, prints, and ephemera become vessels of emotional memory, questioning how borrowed symbols are absorbed, reimagined, and worn.
Rather than offering nostalgia as comfort, CREASIAN DESIGN positions it as a lens for critical reflection. What does it mean to “see” a culture from afar? How do collective dreams and myths shape personal identity? And how can design articulate the feeling of being in-between—between languages, places, and timelines?
Blending fashion, archival visuals, and storytelling, the project invites audiences to navigate the blurry lines between fact and feeling, heritage and aspiration. CREASIAN DESIGN INC. is not just a brand—it’s an evolving map of cultural translation, where memory becomes material and design becomes dialogue.
Technical Details
The project integrates tools across visual design, interactive prototyping, and digital development to create a unified brand experience rooted in both analog memory and contemporary technology.
Visual Design & Branding: Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign were used to craft the visual identity system, garment graphics, packaging design, and brand collateral such as posters, matchboxes, and lifestyle objects.
UI/UX & Prototyping: Figma was used to prototype the Creasian App and responsive website layouts.
Website Development: The official website was built using Webflow.
App Development: The app prototype was developed in Xcode using Swift, with a beta version in progress.
3D Visualization & Mockups: 3D mockups were created using tools like Spline and Photoshop composites to visualize product form.
AI-Assisted Creative Tools: AIGC tools were used to explore narrative directions, expand visual motifs, and support concept ideation through moodboards and text-image prompts.
Research/Context
CREASIAN DESIGN INC. was informed by research into brand identity systems, immersive experience design, and narrative strategies in fashion. The project investigates how storytelling, when embedded in visual language and material culture, can construct emotional belonging across cultural divides.
A core area of research was the 1990s American preppy trend—its connection to class, aspiration, and the aesthetics of East Coast collegiate life. This was examined in parallel with the rise of nautical symbols in fashion and how such imagery was exported, consumed, and reinterpreted abroad—especially in China during its early media globalization era.
The project also draws from experience design frameworks to build slower, reflective interactions—transforming fashion retail into a narrative-driven ritual. Inspiration came from darkroom metaphors, museum display logic, and the idea of garments as emotional documents.
Storytelling was a critical tool—not just for branding, but as a method to explore how memory and identity are constructed from cultural fragments. Seen through a diasporic lens, CREASIAN DESIGN INC. asks how we absorb, remix, and wear other cultures, and how those acts become part of our personal and collective narratives.