Áo Dài Collective

Recognizing the need for a space for Vietnamese women artists, I decided to start one.

Experience more at: aodaicollective.org

Introduction

Role

Founder, Editor Lead, Website Design

Timeline

Aug 2020 - Aug 2022

Team

Trang Nguyen, Lia Le, Hazel Le, and countless others :)

Tool

Squarespace for web design, CSS for web development

While on my gap year during COVID, the year of 2020, I had time to reflect upon my values and upbringing in Vietnam. Community building and addressing gender inequality in Vietnam has always been a passion of mine. However, I found that there lacks a space that provided this for women around Vietnam. Combining my identity as an artist and story-teller, I decided that an accessible digital platform where women can come together and share their art and stories.

The Challenge

There’s currently no space or platform specifically dedicated to Vietnamese women's voices. COVID amplified this by taking away community for a lot of us.

How can we build space and community for Vietnamese women during these trying times?

Initial Research

Realizing the issue that we had in our community, coupled with the isolation of COVID-19 at the time, I started brainstorming ideas on how we could fix this.

After brainstorming, I came up with the idea to start a digital platform that incorporated social media and an online magazine dedicated to Vietnamese women's voices.

I sat down with a friend and we decided to start our project. I looked to my extended community members to gage interest in the project and invited them to join the team.

Email sent to extended community members as invitation

First issue masthead

Process

For our first issue, we decided to showcase our community with different projects:

  1. A photoshoot to celebrate body positivity

  2. A video interview to follow the photoshoot

  3. Writing that celebrates the theme

  4. Interviews and artist profiles

Me and our outreach lead conducting an interview with a local Vietnamese artist

A few behind the scene photos taken with my film camera

Website Walkthrough

During my time working on this project, I designed and built the website on which our content was hosted. Here’s a brief walkthrough of it through video

Social Media Campaign

As a part of my role, I also helped run the social media page for our magazine. I designed, scheduled, and also facilitated collaboration with several organizations, such as iSEE, The Institute for Studies of Society, Economy and Environment to promote the legalization of same-sex marriage in Vietnam.

A few of our social media posts and campaigns

Takeaways

This is one of my proudest achievements in life! I learned so much from this project, especially:

  1. Leadership and community building

  2. How to build a brand

  3. Building a website (and a lot of CSS code)

  4. Establishing connections among greater community members

  5. Countless other things I can’t name right now (but ask me about it!)