oPeninG sPReaD An
Elizabethan-inspired gown
with leg of mutton sleeves,
embroidered with French
chantilly lace and seed pearlsThe
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 is not so
well-known is the other side of Sylvia... the story of a
life nothing short of amazing.Sylvia’s STORY
Many suns ago, at the invitation of local rulers, Hakka
and Cantonese miners carved out uncertain futures –Sylvia Kho was Singapore’s
foremost bridal couturier, innovator
and entrepreneur in the arts of
fashion, beauty and decorationtheir yield of tin ore from the mountain ranges of the
Malay Peninsula. Breaking their backs and fettered
by indentures, these men from South China toiled
amidst harsh tropical terrain. Kanching in Selangor,
in the Federated Malay States (1896) was a tin mining
and commercial centre, the seat of the Cantonese
secret society, Ghee Hin Kongsi, whose name meant
“the rise of righteousness”. Within this extraordinary
setting, unfettered unions unfurled, free from familial
constraints and traditions.
Hakka tin miner and rubber planter Wong Yat Hin
didn’t conform in seeking a bride from his native South
China. He had however, one unusual criterion – hisleFt A late 1930s photo of Sylvia
Kho, displayed at the Peranakan
Museum as part of their “Great
Peranakans” exhibition