Based in the busy, vibrant city of Hong Kong, fashion and lifestyle luminary Adele Leung owns and manages her unique business. ‘AdeleLeung.hk’ offers a full package of creative services styling, photography, fashion, food and lifestyle.

​A woman who has her finger on the pulse in every aspect of her business, her experience in the fashion industry is hands on and first hand. Adele is a ‘people first person’ and runs her business accordingly – not usual in today’s corporate fashion world.

UME: Your work sounds amazing - what is involved in being a fashion stylist

​Adele: Our work is about people. We are in relationship every step of the way, within the team and with the companies we work with. This is a relationship that is shared with the clients we meet and in the creative work we produce.

Adele: Well, to be very honest I’m not really interested in ‘fashion’.  I really enjoy the expression of beauty, and that to me is a kind of harmony, things coming together so that you can feel the different parts working together to present the whole picture. 

​I’ve always enjoyed looking at things in a different way so that’s my definition of being creative, because I actually am not sure what the world’s definition of creativity means. I feel that being creative is expressing things which can be looked at ‘out of the box’.  So that’s how I have lived my life. You know, before we see something, before it’s visual, it’s actually felt first.  So that’s a very natural feeling inside of me that wants to be expressed out.

​I remember when my parents took me to a shop and I bought a blouse with flowers on and a pair of corduroy pants with a pair of suede ankle lace up boots and I remember, it’s not so much how it looked – that was important as well – but more so it was how it felt when I put everything on my body; the softness of the cotton of the blouse with the lovely kind of velvety feeling of the corduroy pants and the comfort of the shoes, but also how it looked . . . you know that kind of suede . . . the colour the deep browns, the burgundies with the pale yellow blouse . . . again this kind of purpley burgundy colour. 

​Everything just kind of matched together in physicality as well as in feeling.  Those two levels were always important for me  – there was the inner as well as the outer – that they matched and actually spoke in alignment with each other . . . that for me was important. 

​At the age of 17 my parents sent me from my home in Hong Kong to Canada. I studied at university, first as a chemistry major because I felt at the time, that was what my family wanted, but then I went to Chinese studies to learn more about the Chinese culture. 

​At that time I was looking for a job and a friend told me there was a fashion boutique hiring and I felt, oh yeah, I could do that. I went and had an interview and they hired me as a retail customer service person. I really wanted to work there. I could feel in one sense I did it because of a rebellion – as in I know this would not be what my family wanted me to do – but at the same time I felt it was something that really felt natural to me. 

​Absolutely and I really feel it’s necessary for me to do it this way because I’d never studied, I never studied anything that related to fashion or design or photography etc. It’s actually very, very, very helpful to learn this way, to learn everything – by living it basically.

​In the shop I did retail customer service and then buying, and then I left that job, came back to Hong Kong and worked in magazines. From there I started to learn the publication industry. I learnt editing, writing, styling, dealing with people, connecting and working fashion shoots, getting to know the models as well as being a model myself.  

​The magazine felt like it was a kind of an avant-garde way of expressing. It was basically about really speaking your mind, speaking how it felt, finding a different way to express things which felt cool – fashion, music, culture, all of that, and there was a calling inside of me that really, really niggled at me saying ‘you’ve got to express, there are so many things inside of you that you’ve got to express . . . start expressing.’ 

​I work in the fashion and image industry and everything we do is about creating images. 
Not only are we creating images we are influencing the whole world with the images we create. Every image that is put out consolidates our world in one way or another. 

​At first there was a thirst within me to create but after a while, it was clear that no matter what was created it will never be enough. 

​When the creative process is fulfilled the next stimulation is already in seeking. The unending need for stimulation was clearly destructive to my body.