Danger By Definition:
Lựu Đạn Is Hung La’s New Look

Because Vietnamese is monosyllabic, you’re often combining two words. Lựu means pomegranate, and đạn means bullet. Lựu đạn together means grenade. When you describe a man as lựu đạn, it means that he’s a little bit dangerous. He’s a little bit sleazy. He’s not somebody you want to bring home to mom. He drinks, he smokes. It’s also a playful term. You can call a kid lựu đạn, and it means he’s a troublemaker—he’s up to no good, he’s quite explosive. It has many meanings, and I guess it came from a conversation with my dad. I wanted to choose a name that put these characters in spaces where maybe Vietnamese words haven’t been put before.

It was kind of that classic first-generation American experience. I was born in the U.S., my parents traveled from Vietnam in the ‘70s, and they met in university there. My grandfather was the ambassador between the U.S. and Vietnam, so he was quite influential in my life and in Vietnamese history. Originally, one of the other brand names that we were considering was Hoài Nam, which was his pen name. It means remembering Vietnam, in a way, so that heritage has always been really grounded in my upbringing.

My first language was Vietnamese, and there was a very insular community on the weekends. We have these photos of going to the beach, and there are, like, 150 Asian people lined up. But when I went to school, there was a broader mix of cultures. It was quite a suburban upbringing. House with a garage, riding bikes, that typical American suburban dream for an immigrant family. But still, you maintain those Asian values. You still celebrate Lunar New Year, you still eat traditional foods. In a way, I was quite spoiled. I had a little bit of both worlds. But there was always that conflict between what I was seeing outside and what was inside my home.

And for me, when I became a teenager, I kind of chose a side. And it wasn’t the Asian side. I leaned into wanting to express myself through music and going out, drinking and partying. It became almost like a rebellion against what I felt were traditional values. I think a lot of Asian Americans go through—some people call it whitewashing—this internalized racism of rejecting your parents’ culture because you think it’s not cool.

Hmm, like Guns N' Roses, Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers. A lot of grunge. And before that, a little bit of heavy metal.

I did go through that phase, too. But that was more in my 20s.

We actually do raver pants in collection two. We call it the phat leg, like those JNCO wide-leg denims. It’s interesting to talk about the shapes of the legs, because I think they’re very expressive at LỰU ĐẠN. You’re always going to see a baggier trouser, lower crotch. Wide legs or quite slim and stretch. Or bell bottoms. All of these iterations of "fun pants," I’ll call them. It’s like going out, going to a rave, going to a club in the ‘70s with your three-piece suit. It’s all fitting within the character. And the Bontan specifically, the way it was worn by these Japanese motorcycle gangs, it was a subversion of a uniform. Like: I’ll play your game, but fuck you. I'll wear your uniform, but I’m gonna make it look crazy.

Oh, I’d love to see photos of that. My ambition at Lựu Đạn is to put forward an overtly sexy Asian man. I was having a talk with the photographer Peter Ash Lee about what is seen as appropriate for Asian masculinity in the media, and there’s just not a lot of space devoted to an Asian man with strength or sex appeal. I find that nurturing the space for that is really paramount to what we’re doing. You see it in the images on our mood board—George Hashiguchi and Katsumi Watanabe—it’s this Asian masculinity that’s very cool, very easy. It's important to me to put these stories and these characters forward because it shows that there’s so much more depth.

I think the most transformative experience was actually my spiritual practice. One beautiful meditation that I do is: imagine that your hands are your mother’s hands, imagine that your back is your father’s back. Imagine that your hair is your grandmother’s hair. Imagine that your feet are your grandfather’s feet. What this does, for me, is speak to a kind of connectivity or interbeing with your family. In Asian cultures, I feel like we’re always talking about ancestors. I remember being 20 years old at Lunar New Year, lighting incense and being asked to speak to my ancestors, and it didn’t make any sense. I was like, Why am I talking to these dead people? But when I started doing that meditation, I realized that if you look at the lineage in that way, my existence is because of my ancestors. It's not separate. They lived their whole lives so that I could have mine. Without them, I don’t exist. And one of the most beautiful practices in Buddhism is healing your ancestors’ trauma and understanding that a lot of the unfortunate things you inherited from them, you can heal it in yourself, and in a way heal them.

It’s kind of healing my past, my transgressions. I think what LỰU ĐẠN allows me to do is come full circle with all of those things. There’s a lot of shame involved in it, there was a lot of anger. LỰU ĐẠN allows me to embrace that without judgment, as part of my history. Fashion can be really powerful for creating communities and tribes and a sense of belonging. I think the vocabulary of it can be limiting as far as what you can actually speak about, but when it comes to creating visual identity, it’s one of the quickest and most powerful tools of self-expression.

Thinking about my journey, it’s that self-acceptance that allowed me to embrace my culture. So much of it was—in my teenage years, in my 20s—about rebelling against all of these values, all of these structures. That self-acceptance is something that I can only hope LỰU ĐẠN helps facilitate in other people. And even if the connection to what we're doing has nothing to do with that—if it’s on a really basic level of, like, I just like the way that looks—maybe they’ll appreciate it later, when they hear the story.