Both tailors, his parents spent their days cutting fabric, drafting patterns, and hunched over sewing machines. Like many children of craftsmen, he helped out too, but he hated it.
“I always felt it was very boring,” Lim revealed. “I couldn’t imagine doing this for the rest of my life.”
Yet years later, the same world he once resisted prepared him for a moment few Malaysian designers ever experience: seeing one of his suits worn by a stylist standing beside Beyoncé at the Met Gala in New York City, and appearing on the front page of The Wall Street Journal.
The suit was worn by celebrity stylist Ty Hunter, a longtime fashion figure best known for his work with Beyoncé. According to Lim, Hunter personally requested to wear one of his designs for fashion’s biggest night.
“He told me Beyoncé was returning to the Met Gala after 10 years and that it would be a very special moment,” Lim, 26, shared with FMT Lifestyle.
“A lot of designers reached out to style him for the event, but he only wanted to wear Dickson Lim.”
Even then, this fourth of five siblings did not immediately grasp the scale of what was unfolding.
“I was very chill about it,” he admitted with a laugh. “In this line of work, stylists request pieces all the time. Sometimes they wear it, sometimes they don’t. So I only celebrate when it actually happens.”
Hunter eventually chose one of three pieces Lim had sent from his existing collection. When photos from the Met Gala surfaced online, Lim suddenly found himself staring at his desigon one of the world’s most watched red carpets. Then came the Wall Street Journal cover.
“That was even crazier!” he exclaimed. “The Met Gala was already insane. Seeing Ty next to Beyoncé was already crazy. But then seeing my design printed on the cover of the Wall Street Journal… that felt next level.”
For Lim, the achievement carries extra weight because his journey into fashion was anything but conventional. He never attended fashion school.
In fact, he originally dreamed of becoming a movie director. But growing up outside major creative circles made the film industry feel financially risky and heavily dependent on connections.
So he pivoted. At 18, he learnt tailoring while helping his father. But instead of making traditional garments, he began experimenting almost immediately, dismantling and reconstructing suits into unusual silhouettes.
“The first garment I made was already deconstructed,” he recalled. “I didn’t know how to sketch designs or anything. I just experimented.”
People around him did not understand it at first. “I showed my friends and parents and they thought it was weird,” he shared. “They asked why I was wasting my time making these things.”
But Lim had always been drawn to taking things apart. As a child, he would unscrew toys just to see how they worked before reassembling them. Eventually, clothes became the objects of his curiosity.
A year after learning tailoring by watching countless hours of videos on YouTube and reading books, he caught the attention of the founder of Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, who invited him to present a collection. Lim was just 19!
Suddenly, the teenager who once dreaded tailoring found himself building a fashion label from scratch while studying business at university and working with his father. He later dropped out to focus fully on his brand, The Dickson Lim.
Today, Lim describes his aesthetic as “reimagined tailoring”: clean, sculptural, wearable pieces that challenge conventional suiting without becoming chaotic.
“When people think of tailoring, they think of the same designs they’ve seen for decades,” he said. “I want to give people a new perspective.”
That perspective is now reaching far beyond Malaysia, with artistes and stylists from places like China and Hong Kong commissioning his work, including Mason Alexander Park, rapper 24kGoldn, and Taiwanese actor Kuan-Ting Liu.
Still, Lim remains deeply aware of where he came from.
“People don’t associate Kuching with fashion,” he said. “But I think your future is not determined by where you’re born. It’s determined by what you do with it.”
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