Reimagining The Horse: 5 Lucky Money Envelopes By Vietnamese Designers

Speed, ignition, transition—three keywords often used to describe the Year of the Fire Horse in feng shui. But for Vietnamese and Vietnamese-diaspora designers, what other meanings does the horse carry?

What connects these designs is not a shared theme: some enter into dialogue with feng shui, some register a sense of unease amid contemporary cultural shifts, some daydream for a hopeful year ahead. Yet what ties it all together is a balance for what lies ahead: between looking back and moving forward, between uncertainty and hope.

Đình Collective

Đình teamed up with visual artist Dương Giáp, channeling his streetwise, rebellious visual language into the Fire Horse of Bính Ngọ.

With Xích Mã, the project continues to treat the Gan–Zhi system as a living design language. For Đình, the lunar year isn’t just about the zodiac animal. It carries the temperament of the Heavenly Stems: the Five Elements and the shifting logic of yin and yang. The envelopes unfold as a long-term system—each year a variation, every two years a palette shift guided by a dominant element.

Bính Ngọ is a horse burning in daylight; in Đinh Mùi 2027, the fire moves into the night. Two years per element, yin and yang in rotation, completing the cycle of the Five Elements.

TẾT TẾT TẾT

Có Hí Thì Nên

When we think of horses, we think power, momentum, the urge to keep moving forward. But to run far, sometimes all it takes is encouragement—a small charge of energy to stay the course.

Có hí thì nên twists the Vietnamese saying Có chí thì nên (Where there's a will, there's a way) into a playful mantra for horses full of drive yet hesitant before unclear finish lines. Designer Madeline offers a quiet nudge: just begin, just move. The speed you move with doesn’t matter—only the courage to persist, the patience to endure, and the resolve to arrive where you mean to go.

Hàng Mã

Ze’s (o0ozeo0o) lucky envelope set draws inspiration from the votive paper horse—a sacred image in Vietnamese spiritual practice, traditionally crafted to be burned so offerings and wishes may be sent to ancestors and deities. In folk belief, the votive horse is not merely a ritual object, but a symbolic vessel that bridges the two realms of Yin and Yang, carrying prayers of protection and safe passage into the journey ahead.

Here, they are not meant to burn. Each horse can be unfolded, assembled, and kept as a small talisman. Ze imagines them carrying wishes of luck and prosperity into the new year—an object to be displayed, to remain within one’s living space, quietly offering its blessing in the early days of the year.

oBJECTs

In collaboration with T. Nguyen (Saigon–Sydney), oBJECTs presents a set of lucky money envelopes as a contemporary reading of the horse.

Nguyen’s process begins with the upheavals of contemporary culture—moments when traditional motifs slip into new contexts, bent and reformed into unfamiliar shapes. The horse appears mid-transition: its body dressed in traditional patterning, its head edging toward armor or machinery, hovering between heritage and the present tense.

OHQUAO

OHQUAO’s 2026 Lucky Envelope collection ushers in the Year of the Fire Horse with a palette that’s bright, charged, and in constant motion. Illustrated by founder Simon Phan, the horse becomes a living landscape—sun and moon, grass and flowers woven into its form—setting the rhythm for a new year driven by energy, growth, and forward momentum.