The Emerging Designer Raising Silkworms and Sourcing from Women Farmers

Testing positive for Covid (twice) and being put in quarantine for 28 days doesn’t exactly scream “creative haven.” But for designer Grace Wang, it was the nudge she needed to recognize that her heart lies with design.

“I never even considered fashion as something that I was interested in or something that I saw myself doing in the long run,” she tells Fashionista. “But when you are by yourself for that long of a time, you have a lot of opportunities to think about your life and explore other things.”

At the time, Wang was a first-year student at Edinburgh’s St. Andrews, studying International Relations, French and Arabic. In her free time, she was making her own clothes — partly because she enjoyed it, and partly because she couldn’t afford what other students at the prestigious institution wore. Once Wang landed in quarantine, she realized she wanted to pursue design full-time. So she transferred to New York City’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) and never looked back.

While in school, Wang still designed on the side, but she poured much of her energy into getting industry experience: She landed internships and job stints at Bibhu Mohapatra, Vesper Obscura (then, Mia Vesper), Agbobly and Dauphinette. In 2023, the designer officially branched out on her own with the launch of Grace Gui, a Brooklyn-based knitwear brand.

The label’s production method is one-of-one: In her Brooklyn studio, Grace Gui employs sericulture, the process of raising and harvesting silkworms to produce high-quality silk. (This was not her first foray into the practice; Wang recalls fond memories of raising silkworms with her grandmother during childhood.) Once she formally launched her label, she pondered how she could bring sericulture into the brand.

“One year during Thanksgiving, my auntie was like, ‘I have all these [silkworm] eggs. Do you want some?'” she recounts. “So I took them back to New York and I was freezing them. And then they came out with the cocoons and looking at the cocoons, I was like, ‘What do I do now? I was thinking, ‘Okay, let me experiment. How can I put this on knits?'”

She breaks down the harvesting process: By keeping the eggs in the fridge and simulating “winter,” Wang can make them last as long she wants them to. Then, she takes them out at a 70-degree room temperature (to simulate “spring”), which encourages them to hatch. Once the silkworms hatch into moths, the designer will take the empty cocoons, boil them and pull the resulting strands of silk apart with chopsticks.

“I will see which cocoons I think are high quality,” she further explains. “Some of them are smaller than others, some of them are more yellow, et cetera. Since I’m naturally dying everything, I want everything to be as white as possible. So I’ll take the yellow cocoons, put them in a bin and I’m working on breeding them, cross-breeding them to get a golden color.”

Wang raises up to 1,600 silkworms at once and is exploring ways to increase that number sustainably.

Grace Gui also exclusively sources yarns and raw fibers from women farmers domestically. She’s found many of her current partners at fiber festivals, one-to-two-day-long gatherings where local farmers get together and sell what they produce. Once the materials are acquired, everything is knit in-house by Wang, her assistant and a small group of interns and part-time knitters. (Swimwear, however, is knitted in a factory in Texas.)

It’s important to Wang that there is complete transparency at every step of the design, production and distribution process. That, she says, is a core ethos of the brand. She likens the practice to the Renaissance period, when gowns were handmade, with handspun silks and the best fibers.

“Of course, I’m not doing that much of an archaic concept, but I’m trying to modernize that,” she says. “You know exactly where everything is coming from: which farm the felting is from, where this yarn is from, who made it; I hand-dye everything and all the silkworms are raised in my bedroom right here. I’m trying to modernize this ancient aspect of clothes being about community, people and sustainability rather than pushing out seasons, making money and all these other things that we have turned fashion into.”

Wang’s Chinese-American heritage is another core aspect of Grace Gui. “Growing up in New Jersey, I felt very stifled […] and that really took a toll on me,” she explains. “A lot of my brand is exploring how it was growing up feeling culturally isolated and then taking my adult years to really explore what that felt like and how I want to translate the life lessons that I learned there into now.” She also explores the contrast between growing up in a Western world and being raised with Chinese traditions.

She’ll turn to her grandparents’ ink paintings, her parents’ immigration story and her own journey of accepting her heritage for inspiration. For Grace Gui’s debut Fall 2025 collection — presented during New York Fashion Week and titled, “Will You Carry Your Inheritance Forward?” — Wang examines the emotional complexities of generational matriarchy within Asian American family dynamics.

“A lot of my collection is reflecting on the generations of women in my life and how I see them not being able to ask for help, and then myself learning how to ask for help and learning how to be stronger,” she explains. “I’m reflecting that in my designs by trying to think of different silhouettes that reflect my grandmother and my mom and silhouettes that reflect me and how I would want to teach them the lessons that I’ve learned, but also not impose my Western thought on the eastern culture that they grew up in.”

The collection features a range of new techniques such as boning, sugarcane accessories and 3D printing with cornstarch. She sees her debut presentation as a means of welcoming not only the brand, but also the Grace Gui community. (Standing next to every design was the material breakdown and where it was sourced.)

“I’m just trying to show people that I’m a serious brand and I’m here to stay,” she says. “It’s farm to fashion, yes, but it can also be in this realm of fashion that can compete with other brands.”

Ideally, the event will bring connections with buyers, stockists and more textile creators, the designer says. Wang wants to set the brand up to scale further, which is tricky given her “farm to fashion” approach. For now, the brand has its sights set on working with domestic factories and gaining stockists to keep production made-to-order. Currently sold on its website and at Apoc Store, designs are priced between $79 and $986.

“Right now I’m not focused on making a billion gazillion dollars,” she shares. “I really do want the brand to be accessible to people and start promoting more of this mindset of seeing clothing as an investment rather than something you will buy constantly. I’m even honored if you buy one piece for life.”

Long-term, Wang plans to own a farm upstate that provides a circular production model, including sericulture, raising livestock, knitting and spinning yarn. She also wants to dedicate part of the facility to research: Currently, she’s researching “cross-pollinating dye plants to create newer and brighter colors” and how to include 3D printing in sericulture.

Ultimately, Grace Gui’s mission is to champion transparency for consumers.

“A lot of these brands will say, ‘Yeah, I’m sustainable. I used cotton this season.’ But that’s not transparent,” Wang emphasizes. “In reality, where are [materials] coming from? Who had their hands on that? Why did you pick that place to source it from? The white space I’m trying to fill is bridging the products being put out and the consumer knowing what’s in it.”

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Source: Fashionista.com