About

Michelle Kim is a fashion designer and lifestyle artist known for her maximalist aesthetic. Her work features striking combinations of new and found materials, colors, patterns, and themes punctuated by unexpected decorative flourishes.

As a child growing up during the Eighties in Queens, NY, Michelle was always drawing and designing clothes and accessories. She taught herself how to sew on her family’s sewing machine and at her father’s garment factory, where she was allowed to turn the wheel by hand after the powerful industrial machines had been turned off. While in high school in New Jersey during the Nineties, Michelle would stay up all night sewing and recreating looks that she had obsessed over in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar but couldn’t find in the local malls.  Long before the days of fast fashion, Michelle would repurpose existing clothing and whatever else she could find around the house by cutting them up and sewing them together to make new creations, adding flashes of novelty and surprise with embroidery or dyeing by hand.  Michelle followed her passion for the arts and fashion to the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University, going on to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Parsons School of Design in New York City and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the London College of Fashion.

While still a student at Parsons, Michelle began working as a designer for Anna Sui, where she remained for ten years.  She then moved on to a successful career as a fashion design consultant in New York, balancing her own design work with projects for such clients as Rebecca Taylor, LoveShackFancy, and Foundrae. In 2017, Michelle relocated to Los Angeles to work as design director for G.Label for Goop, and more recently for Chrissy Teigen’s Cravings brand to concept and design. Today, in addition to her work for Cravings, Michelle focuses on bespoke commissions for fashion, home, and events.

Michelle’s design philosophy is inspired by the holistic approaches of Gloria Vanderbilt and the  Wiener Werkstätte movement.  She believes that everything in the home, from housewares to clothing, can and should be beautiful as well as functional. Fifteen years ago, she started creating unique collage decoupage plates and bowls that feature beloved Liberty of London prints (exclusively available at Kneeland Co. Rarities in Los Angeles).  Michelle developed her signature decoupage and appliqué style from the Japanese garden philosophy, which made a profound and lasting impression on her when she first encountered it in a high school art history class.  Her own collage process emerges from this tradition, seeking to arrange existing objects within a perspective with borrowed scenery to create a complete, new landscape. In March 2022, Michelle launched her outdoor tabletop collaboration with Williams Sonoma, where her decoupage work meets a new dimension with printing on melamine and textiles.

Michelle lives in Los Angeles with her rescue dogs, Pom Pom and Tilda.  She is an avid supporter of pet rescue and fostering.  In her spare time, she stays active with bike rides and dog walks, and enjoys knitting sweaters, vegetable gardening (especially kale and hot peppers), cooking, and hosting dinner parties with delicious and healthy food. She is especially passionate about teaching the next generation how to sew and stay creative. 

Michelle’s work has been featured in New York Magazine, Paper, Nippon Vogue, Women’e Wear Daily, Korean Harper’s Bazaar, People Magazine, and Refinery 29.