Review for Hyphen | Reposted at Racia­li­cious and Dia­CRIT­ICS

Per­haps the most cel­e­brated Fall col­lec­tions to debut at this year’s Fash­ion Week were those that cre­atively incor­po­rated tech­nol­ogy. Sev­eral design­ers show­cased computer-generated prints, retool­ing tra­di­tional craft tex­tiles into com­put­er­ized pat­terns com­pris­ing ultra mod­ern gar­ments. But even as fash­ion crit­ics over­whelm­ingly cel­e­brated this pre­pon­der­ance of tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion, most seemed sim­i­larly enam­ored of Ralph Lauren’s far less pio­neer­ing embrace of one of fashion’s old­est tropes: Shang­hai Chic. Crit­ics eagerly ded­i­cated valu­able col­umn inches to the col­lec­tion, which fea­tured all the main­stays of Asian-inspired fash­ion: jade jew­elry, golden drag­ons, cheongsams. While some can­didly won­dered whether the designer’s invo­ca­tion of China was a state­ment about the nation’s grow­ing eco­nomic com­pet­i­tive­ness, oth­ers were sim­ply happy to break out as many tired euphemisms for “East­ern” as pos­si­ble. (Not only did the “Ori­ent Express” make sev­eral stops but East, inevitably, met West.)

The famil­iar sce­nario aptly rein­forces a key obser­va­tion made by cul­ture critic Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu in her newly pub­lished book,  The Beau­ti­ful Gen­er­a­tion: “Even when freed to dream and invent,” she writes, “[design­ers] seem only to return to long-held ideas about an exotic and erotic orient.”

The phe­nom­e­non Nguyen Tu describes, of Euro-American design­ers’ quixotic and cycli­cal infat­u­a­tion with an often undif­fer­en­ti­ated “East,” has for — lit­er­ally — hun­dreds of years dic­tated Asia’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in one of the largest and old­est indus­tries to date. Asia, in the deft hands of fash­ion indus­try titans, is at once a sump­tu­ous fan­tasy and a con­ven­tion in need of con­stant rein­ter­pre­ta­tion; both an inex­pen­sive man­u­fac­tur­ing site and — as one New York Times critic made a point of men­tion­ing with regard to the Ralph Lau­ren col­lec­tion — an expan­sive con­sumer market.

The Beau­ti­ful Gen­er­a­tion, as much a fash­ion his­tory as a cul­tural study, grace­fully takes us through the many phases of that evolv­ing dynamic: From Gaultier’s intro­duc­tion of luxe Chi­nese coats in sev­en­teenth cen­tury Paris, to Amer­i­can Vogue’s strate­gic estab­lish­ment of “fash­ion designer as cul­tural anthro­pol­o­gist” in the mid-‘90s, and finally to the curi­ously suc­cess­fully rise of Asian Amer­i­can design­ers in the present decade. While it’s all a good read, the last is arguably the high­light of the book; Nguyen Tu’s com­pelling exam­i­na­tion of Asian Amer­i­can design­ers, whose pre­car­i­ous posi­tions in the indus­try are plainly defined by their his­toric exclu­sion from it, is clearly a point of per­sonal con­nec­tion for her.

In one way or another, she’s been study­ing those design­ers since the 1990s when, as a grad stu­dent at New York Uni­ver­sity, she began notic­ing that a num­ber of emer­gent down­town bou­tiques were helmed by Asian Amer­i­can women. Ini­tially dri­ven by her recog­ni­tion of a unique cul­tural phe­nom­e­non (up to that point, Asian Amer­i­cans in the fash­ion indus­try had been rel­e­gated to low-wage man­u­fac­tur­ing jobs), she was even­tu­ally pro­pelled by the real­iza­tion that she shared a lot more with the design­ers than just a fine fash­ion sense.

Like many of the design­ers she inter­viewed, Nguyen Tu had emi­grated from Viet­nam as a child, and her fam­ily had set­tled in what she describes as “all-white work­ing class towns in Con­necti­cut … urban spaces where it was hoped we would assim­i­late faster.” Her work­ing class par­ents, whose vision of accept­able work cen­tered on the poten­tial for finan­cial secu­rity, expected her to become a phar­ma­cist or, if she was really ambi­tious, a doc­tor. But her osten­si­bly poor com­mand of the sci­ences even­tu­ally pushed her towards lib­eral arts and, to her parent’s dis­may, a PhD in Amer­i­can Studies.

“It was like telling them I was going to join the cir­cus,” she said. “And through­out my inter­views with the design­ers I heard the same thing … the same story of how parental expec­ta­tions enabled us to do the work that we did even as it con­strained us.”

As she learned, famil­ial ties and expec­ta­tions fig­ured promi­nently in the rise of Asian Amer­i­can design­ers, inform­ing their careers paths and per­spec­tives on the indus­try while lend­ing them valu­able human and mate­r­ial resources dur­ing their lean begin­ning years. Most of the design­ers she inter­viewed (includ­ing nota­bles like Philip Lim, Derek Lam and Doo-Ri Chung) were the chil­dren of gar­ment pro­duc­ers — the low wage sew­ers, cut­ters and pat­tern mak­ers upon which the fash­ion indus­try relies. From an early age, the design­ers had assisted their par­ents with piece­work, learn­ing to cut, sew and assem­ble. Yet few set out to become design­ers, influ­enced instead by their par­ents’ nar­row views of accept­able work as much as by cul­tural stereo­types that depict Asians as indus­tri­ous but inher­ently uncreative.

“The major­ity of peo­ple that I inter­viewed didn’t even go to fash­ion school,” Nguyen Tu said. “Instead … they went to den­tal school.”

While many told Nguyen Tu that sewing was in their blood, hav­ing been trained in the skill since child­hood, most nev­er­the­less pur­sued rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent careers — in finance, biol­ogy, anthro­pol­ogy, etc. — before cir­cling back to the fash­ion indus­try as designers.

But unlike the pro­to­typ­i­cal Amer­i­can designer (who, accord­ing to Nguyen Tu, strives to dis­tance him­self from “unskilled” pro­duc­ers in an effort to ele­vate his own role in the cre­ative process), Asian Amer­i­can design­ers have tended toward the reverse. Guided by their inti­mate con­nec­tions to gar­ment work­ers and famil­ial expec­ta­tions about the nature of accept­able work, they are more inclined to view fash­ion design as chiefly a busi­ness rather than an art, and tend to empha­size their close rela­tion­ships with pro­duc­ers rather than eschew them. For many, this pays off. While fash­ion design is an unsta­ble, finan­cially risky, and resource-intense occu­pa­tion for most, Asian Amer­i­can design­ers have ben­e­fited from their inti­ma­cies with pro­duc­ers, who can pro­vide them with both labor and mate­r­ial resources at lit­tle or no cost. It’s a cru­cial advan­tage that has enabled many Asian Amer­i­cans to stay com­pet­i­tive in an espe­cially gen­dered and racial­ized industry.

And just as the Amer­i­can chil­dren of gar­ment work­ers are increas­ingly cross­ing the assem­bly line — grad­u­at­ing from the indus­trial to the cre­ative — so are Asian sites of out­sourc­ing lever­ag­ing their man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­tries into more lucra­tive cre­ative cen­ters. Once the orig­i­nal locales of inex­pen­sive labor, China and Korea have started ded­i­cat­ing con­sid­er­able resources to cul­ti­vat­ing home-grown design tal­ent, send­ing scores of Chi­nese and Korean fash­ion stu­dents to New York every year to acquire skills and expo­sure. Though their fash­ion indus­tries are fledg­ling yet, the trans­for­ma­tive effort has plainly pro­voked anx­i­ety within the Euro-American fash­ion indus­try; Nguyen Tu notes that the lat­ter has sub­se­quently striven to define itself as a global inno­va­tor by rein­forc­ing the industry’s cre­ative vs “unskilled” dichotomy. Euro-American design­ers are embrac­ing tech­nol­ogy, ever-reinventing famil­iar motifs and fur­ther dis­tanc­ing them­selves from the mass-producing masses in an effort to main­tain their global dominence.

Indeed, the defen­sive pos­tur­ing and indus­try angst to which she alludes were in full swing at this year’s Fash­ion Week — in the self-aggrandizing speech of design­ers, on the ultra-modernized backs of mod­els, and even in lauda­tory main­stream reviews. Com­ment­ing on Ralph Lauren’s col­lec­tion, for instance, the New York Times’ Suzy Menkes repeat­edly jux­ta­poseddescrip­tions of the designer’s Shanghai-inspired aes­thetic with dis­parag­ing ref­er­ences to the “fast fash­ion fac­to­ries of today’s China” and Asia’s “Made in China”-quality mass productions.

Asian Amer­i­can design­ers don’t get off too eas­ily either, falling as they do some­where between artist and pro­ducer, Amer­i­can and for­eigner. While crit­ics extolled Ralph Lauren’s and Oscar De La Renta’s mod­ern­iza­tion of “tourist trap” Asian motifs, for exam­ple, they also repeat­edly and sim­plis­ti­cally cat­e­go­rized the com­mer­cial suc­cess of Asian Amer­i­can design­ers as the prod­uct of Asian con­sump­tion. Review­ing Anna Sui’s col­lec­tion, Menkes patron­iz­ingly notes that “Ms. Sui may have had a big suc­cess in the Asia of her fam­ily ori­gins, but her heart is for­ever in the Eng­land of swing­ing Lon­don, with its lay­ers of his­tory.” At Vogue, Hamish Bowles curi­ouslyremarks that Jason Wu’s “con­ser­v­a­tive” col­lec­tion would never be as rad­i­cally decon­struc­tion­ist as those of the Japan­ese designer Kawakubo — notwith­stand­ing the fact that their aes­thet­ics are so rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent that they defy com­par­i­son; their only tan­gi­ble sim­i­lar­ity is their (albeit diver­gent) Asian her­itage. Mark Hol­gale, also writ­ing for Vogue, sim­i­larly makes much of Philip Lim’s con­nec­tions to Asia, attribut­ing the designer’s cur­rent and future suc­cesses to the vora­ciously con­sump­tive Chi­nese — even as he notes that Chi­nese con­sumers are just as “famil­iar with every­one from Altuzarra to Rodarte.”

The stark dif­fer­ences between crit­i­cal recep­tion of Asian Amer­i­can work and that of main­stream, estab­lish­ment design­ers seems to sug­gest that, while Asian cul­tures des­per­ately require West­ern design­ers to mod­ern­ize and retool their ele­ments into some­thing worth pur­chas­ing, Asian Amer­i­can design­ers nev­er­the­less owe every­thing to their Far East­ern touch­stones. In either case, the Euro-American fash­ion estab­lish­ment wins … but per­haps not for long.

“I think the dom­i­nance of Euro-American fash­ion will even­tu­ally wane,” Nguyen Tu spec­u­lated. “They’ve held the monop­oly for over 200 years, but I think there will be a rad­i­cal shift away from the US and Europe as the only cen­ters of fash­ion, and that China and India and all of these places will rise in a sort of global realign­ment of where we get our style … and in the pro­duc­tion of fash­ion itself.”

The Beau­ti­ful Gen­er­a­tion: Asian Amer­i­cans and the Cul­tural Econ­omy of Fash­ion
By Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu
Duke Uni­ver­sity Press | 2010

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