On the Rise: Aselectfew Blends Tech and South Asian Nostalgia

A promising career in entertainment design (read: making roller coasters) may sound like a dream for an engineer, but flying all over the world and working on $10-million projects wasn’t exactly the thrill ride Moneey Singh had hoped for. “As much as I enjoyed the travel aspect and the design elements, there was a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of code,” he shares. “My parents immigrated from India to Canada and allowed me to get educated here—I just felt like they had such a large purpose, and I wanted to think bigger than the corporate nine-to-five.”

So in 2018, Singh founded Aselectfew, a Vancouver-based cross-cultural fashion brand that merges relaxed, cozy elements with luxury design. Take the KMBL pullover: it’s a deadstock fleece sweater inspired by a blanket that brings back all kinds of nostalgia for Singh. “That plush, polyester blanket very common within South Asian households—I would even say Asian households, especially immigrant families—has these rich floral prints and a grandma-esque colour palette,” he explains. Singh notes that the material and pattern aren’t usually associated with status, so translating it into a luxe pullover isn’t just a fashion statement—it’s a statement of cultural pride.

The brand’s anorak jackets, designed using 3D tech, are another example of Singh’s ingenuity. “Rather than making multiple samples, which is kind of wasteful and very expensive, we’ve utilized technology to get form and fit refined before we make a physical piece,” he says. The majority of the collection from Aselectfew (with garments ranging from T-shirts and bucket hats to monogrammed jeans and silk-panelled hockey jerseys) is made in Vancouver. “I believe that if you want to innovate you have to be part of the whole process… I need to be learning from my mistakes in real time,” says Singh. So perhaps he hasn’t totally left the roller-coaster world behind: ups and downs are part of the job.