Diệu Bui

Diệu Bui is a British Vietnamese fashion image maker working across photography and styling. Her creative practice is rooted in documentary sensibilities, using fashion as a language to explore identity, memory, and lived experience from the perspective of someone existing at the intersections of marginalised communities. As a working-class, third culture kid navigating multiple cultural identities, Bui approaches image-making as a radical act of self-definition and resistance.

Bui's work often blurs the boundaries between fashion, portraiture, and cultural documentation. With a focus on London’s third spaces—raves, music collectives, and grassroots gatherings — her work draws inspiration from underground scenes such as Eastern Margins, where fashion, sound, and identity converge. These subcultural spaces not only inform her visual aesthetic but also serve as sites of cultural exchange, solidarity, and disruption. Her ongoing documentary photography captures these moments of collective energy, exploring how diasporic youth reimagine community, visibility, and belonging.

Through her lens, Bui seeks to archive the present while imagining new cultural futures shaped by layered realities and identity.

“To live is to perform” – Inspired by alternative fashion cultivated in third spaces such as rave culture, “To live is to perform” is a visual exploration of escapism through personal style.

”Out of Context“ – Reimagined Vietnamese motorbike culture and fashion, within a western context, in an exploration of contemporary fashion trends for Final Major Project.

“Into the Third” – Film photography book, an archive of contemporary fashion and culture in London’s third spaces, featuring events such as Genesys, Boileroom: Clubshy, Eastern margins x Planet fun.

“Yellow Peril Zine” spread – Yellow Peril Zine is an exploration and archive of ESEA fashion and culture that has established itself via the internet, serving as a testimony to Bui's relationship with alternative asian media, as a child raised in the digital age.

“Untold Stories” – Gif outcome with soundscape, using recorded sounds of physical bus journey layered with real Vietnamese conversation, reflecting the movement of Vietnamese migrants to the UK.