Sylvia Kho was Singapore’s foremost bridal couturier, innovator and entrepreneur in the arts of fashion, beauty and decoration The question posed in German composer Franz Schubert’s immortal art song, “Who is Sylvia?”, may be answered in this appreciation and retrospective on Singapore’s Renaissance woman, Sylvia Kho (1917–2013), innovator and entrepreneur in the arts of fashion, beauty and decoration. As Singapore’s foremost bridal couturier, creative, multi-talented Sylvia could perform even the most mundane of tasks with a certain, unmistakeable Sylvian flair.
She not only changed the course of local sartorial currents, but created a whole new industry centred around one of society’s most important rites of passage – the institution of marriage, and she is well-remembered by hundreds of local and regional brides from the 1950s to the 1970s. Perhaps what…