The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion - Brossura

Tu, Thuy Linh Nguyen

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0822349132 ISBN 13: 9780822349136

Casa editrice: Duke University Press, 2010

Riassunto

Since the 1990s, young Asian Americans including Doo-Ri Chung, Derek Lam, Thakoon Panichgul, Alexander Wang, and Jason Wu have emerged as leading fashion designers. They have won prestigious awards, been chosen to head major clothing labels, and had their designs featured in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and other fashion magazines. At the same time that these designers were rising to prominence, the fashion world was embracing Asian chic. During the 1990s, “Asian” shapes, fabrics, iconography, and colors filled couture runways and mass-market clothing racks. In The Beautiful Generation, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu explores the role of Asian American designers in New York’s fashion industry, paying particular attention to how they relate to the garment workers who produce their goods and to Asianness as a fashionable commodity. She draws on conversations with design students, fashion curators, and fashion publicists; interviews with nearly thirty Asian American designers who have their own labels; and time spent with those designers in their shops and studios, on their factory visits, and at their fashion shows. The Beautiful Generation links the rise of Asian American designers to historical patterns of immigration, racial formation, and globalized labor, and to familial and family-like connections between designers and garment workers.

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Informazioni sugli autori

Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu is Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies at New York University. She is a co-editor of Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America, also published by Duke University Press, and TechniColor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life.

Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu is Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies at New York University. She is a co-editor of Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America, also published by Duke University Press, and Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life.

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the BEAUTIFUL generation

ASIAN AMERICANS and the CULTURAL ECONOMY of FASHIONBy Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4913-6

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..................................................................................ixINTRODUCTION Fashion, Free Trade, and the "Rise of the Asian Designer"..........................11. Crossing the Assembly Line: Skills, Knowledge, and the Borders of Fashion.....................312. All in the Family? Kin, Gifts, and the Networks of Fashion....................................633. The Cultural Economy of Asian Chic............................................................994. "Material Mao": Fashioning Histories Out of Icons.............................................1335. Asia on My Mind: Transnational Intimacies and Cultural Genealogies............................169EPILOGUE.........................................................................................203NOTES............................................................................................209BIBLIOGRAPHY.....................................................................................239INDEX............................................................................................253

Chapter One

CROSSING THE ASSEMBLY LINE

SKILLS, KNOWLEDGE, AND THE BORDERS OF FASHION

In 2005 fashion fans in the United States were treated to two dramatic media events: the release of Douglas Keeve's much-anticipated documentary, Seamless, and the return of the hit television show, Project Runway. Keeve's behind-the-scenes film examined the harsh realities of the fashion business by following designers as they competed for the first annual CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, a prestigious $200,000 prize awarded to one emerging American designer every year. The stakes were high: the money and exposure could make or break a designer's career. Even though the finalists represented ballyhooed, high-end brands such as Habitual, Libertine, and Cloak, none of them had yet turned a profit, despite reams of press coverage and boutiques stocked with their thousand-dollar dresses. (In fact, several finalists closed their businesses the following year.) The documentary—and the prize itself, established to buttress flagging sales after September 11—was a grim reminder of the odds against making it in fashion, talent notwithstanding.

Project Runway, which also followed designers trying to win a fashion prize, was much more upbeat. Broadcast initially on Bravo, with video confessions and celebrity guests, the show was a reality television competition in which designers competed for a chance to present their work during Olympus Fashion Week. Unlike the Seamless designers, these contestants were judged solely on their ability to make one-off pieces in a series of television-friendly challenges, occasionally for celebrity clients (like the heiress Nicky Hilton) and often out of implausible materials (like flowers).

Though quite different, these two productions had several similarities. Both presented comparable narratives, dramatizing a series of eliminations before unveiling a winner in the last, nail-biting moment. Both capitalized on fashion's glamour, while promising viewers a gritty glimpse behind the scenes. Both featured a significant number of Asian American contestants—a testament to that group's burgeoning presence in fashion. Three of the ten finalists for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund were Asian Americans (Peter Som, Derek Lam, and Doo-Ri Chung), as were three of the sixteen for Project Runway (Diana Kim, Guadalupe Vidal, and Chloe Dao). And the two productions framed their Asian American contestants in oddly similar ways.

In his film, Keeve featured three of the ten finalists for the cfda/Vogue award most prominently: Alexandre Plokhov (designer for the menswear line of Cloak), the team of Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough (designers for Proenza Schouler), and Doo-Ri Chung (for Doo.Ri). While the director scripted all three contestants as similarly talented and hardworking, Chung's story was given a unique treatment. Unlike the other designers, who were shown toiling in their studios alone, Chung was repeatedly presented in the context of her family. When the judges came to view her collection, they were introduced to her parents, who were lingering shyly nearby. (Chung's workshop was actually housed in the basement of her parent's dry-cleaning store, which, in a dramatic turn, burned down during the filming.) In later scenes, Chung is filmed at dinner with her family; they appear again during her runway show. Chung even confessed that it is her mother who sews the zippers on her dresses.

On Project Runway, Chloe Dao, the winner of that season's competition, was presented in a very similar manner. Dao's family too becomes a central part of her story, whereas the families of the other contestants get only passing mentions. When Tim Gunn, the show's resident expert, visits Dao's workshop, he is introduced to Dao's mother, also lingering shyly nearby. Dao still lives with her parents in Houston, where her family emigrated after spending time in a Laotian refugee camp. Dao shows Gunn pictures of her seven sisters; her brand, Lot 8, is named for the eight children. She recounts to Gunn the story of the family's harrowing attempt to escape from the Viet Cong and their subsequent imprisonment in Laos. He is appropriately shocked, and not surprisingly so, given that his previous meeting with one of the finalists consisted of a trip to the mall. Before he leaves, Gunn poses for a snapshot with Dao's entire family.

Why this strikingly similar representation of Asian American designers? If these types of stories were highlighted only to add color to the show's predictable dramatic arc, why not dig for them among all the designers? In one sense, it would be easy to read this through the lens of Orientalism. By framing Chung and Dao in this way, these productions constructed them as typical model minorities—as children of immigrants who work hard and make good. The families, particularly the shy and obviously self-sacrificing mothers, serve to reinforce the idea of traditional Asian values and to highlight how far such upbringing has taken their now-successful children. The sensational headlines that accompany the press coverage about these designers make this clear. A Newsweek article on Chung, for instance, was titled: "Doo-Ri Chung: Rising from the Basement to the Big Time." An US Weekly piece on Dao had the headline: "From Refugee to Project Runway." In addition to constructing them as Horatio Algers of the fashion world, this framing reiterates the argument that Asian American designers should not be seen as individual geniuses like their non-Asian counterparts, but as a product of their families, histories, and cultures.

Orientalism may well be at work here, but there is more than a little truth that families have played a crucial role in the working lives of Asian American designers. While Chung's and Dao's stories appear anomalous within these media productions, they are in fact quite characteristic of the experiences of many Asian American designers. Like Dao, who admits that sewing came naturally to her because her mom was a seamstress, many Asian American designers got their start by learning from their parents, who often worked on the lowest rungs of the clothing industry. Like Chung, who relies on her mother to sew zippers, many other designers make use of their family's technical skills and borrow freely from their resources.

This familial history led many to describe their path to fashion design as inevitable, a logical result of their upbringing. But this narrative of inevitability belies a much more complex social process in which families served as points of knowledge transfer and of unpaid or low-paid labor. Access to this knowledge was, moreover, framed by larger social forces, and enacted in the context of larger demands, such as to help the family economically or to learn gender-appropriate skills. Motivated not just by desire but also by compulsion and necessity, this informal training structured Asian American designers' work and shaped their understanding of its nature.

Families and other intimate associates revealed to designers the proximity between the labor of sewing and the work of design, making it difficult for them to embrace the divisions—between the first and second generation, mental and manual work, the creative and the noncreative—that have become entrenched in fashion and elsewhere. It encouraged them to see sewing and sewers as central, rather than marginal, to the production of fashion, and as near rather than distant to their own lives and labors. As such, these relationships formed the foundation for what I have a called an architecture of intimacy—a mode of working that acknowledges and forges proximity, contact, and affiliation between domains imagined as distinct.

"IN MY BLOOD"

If Seamless and Project Runway hinted at the remarkable number of Asian Americans working in fashion, the streets of New York City provided undeniable proof. By the time Chloe Dao and Doo-Ri Chung became fashion news, shops helmed by Asian Americans selling labels bearing their names were cropping up all over New York. As various scruffy residential neighborhoods—in Manhattan's East Village and Lower East Side, and along Park Slope's Fifth Avenue, Carroll Gardens' Smith Street, and Williamsburg's Bedford Street—underwent "boutiquefication" during the mid-1990s, young Asian Americans began taking advantage of the relatively low rents there to launch their design careers. These shops were one of the first and most visible signs of their emergence as a force in design.

But why were so many Asian Americans motivated to pursue careers in fashion at this particular time? Several factors may have contributed to their increased participation during the 1990s. These young designers all came of age after the mid-1980s, a time when, as noted in the introduction, the Japanese three (Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake, and Yohji Yamamoto) had already gained international recognition, and when Asian Americans like Anna Sui and Vera Wang were becoming known as top New York designers. These pioneers opened the door for other Asian designers. More importantly, though, this was a time when national and international interest in high-fashion, or style-sensitive, branded clothing was greatly expanding. As the market for specialized goods grew, the number of new, mostly young designers—whose small labels produced a limited quantity of high-end garments—also grew.

These young designers, members of a category that had barely existed in the industry a few decades before, were helped along by a few developments. First was the existence of relatively affordable retail spaces in the city's gentrifying neighborhoods, which kept start-up costs low and allowed designers to sell directly to their customers. Second was the availability of a local labor force that could quickly produce the small batches of highly variable goods required by young designers seeking to enter the contemporary or high-fashion market. Third was the establishment of New York as a fashion center, with the institution of Fashion Week in the 1990s and the concomitant expansion of the design and retail industries. Fourth was the generation gap in fashion's ranks, which required that the industry find new talent in preparation for the eventual retirement of its established designers. (The spate of recently instituted awards offering young designers cash and other support was meant to do precisely this.) Last was the growth in online magazines and blogs, which allowed these new designers to circumvent the gate-keeping forces of the traditional fashion magazines, and the expansion of e-commerce, which allowed them to sell their goods nationally and even internationally.

These factors lowered what economists call the "barrier of entry" into fashion, making it possible for small-scale entrepreneurs to enter the market. But if these young designers were the industry's greatest hopes, they were also its most vulnerable participants. A full 26 percent of the approximately 22,000 designers working today are self-employed; all but one of the designers I spoke with belong in this category. These men and women operate, essentially, as high-risk entrepreneurs—speculators who make goods they are never sure they will be able to sell. They work in very competitive market, which pits them against not just each other but also the major couture conglomerates and mass-market firms that dominate the fashion industry. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies the level of competition for these jobs as "keen"—meaning "fewer job openings compared with job seekers"—and projects the field to grow about only one percent between 2008 and 2018. Turnover is high, and the field is small (there are 22,000 fashion designers in the United States, but only about half work in design; the remainder work in retail, management, and technical services). Though the rash of celebrity labels and how-to books make it appear as if anyone with a dress and a dream can become a designer, few who start actually stay in the business. Young designers work for years without actually turning a profit; many close their doors before ever doing so.

In 2001, I began meeting with some of these designers, many of whom had just set up their shops in the gentrifying neighborhoods of Nolita, the East Village, or Brooklyn. Boutiques at that time were booming, and there was a sense of optimism about the possibilities in this cultural marketplace. By 2008, when I completed my research, many of them had closed up shop—an indication less of their fitness for the job than of the volatility of the business and their vulnerable place in it. But as these designers shuttered their storefronts, new designers were emerging, many boldly entering the more capital-intensive wholesale market. In fact, their presence only seemed to increase throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Given the volatility of this market, why did Asian American designers fare so well, relatively speaking? How did they manage to meet its demands? Lowered barriers of entry provide only a partial answer. The designers I interviewed all agreed that the changes I outlined above had made the industry more hospitable to them and other young designers. But when I asked my sources how they had come to this work and endured its challenges, none talked in any detail about those factors. Almost all spoke, instead, about their relationships with their families.

The women's wear designer Jussara Lee, for instance, told me about growing up in S? Paulo. The Lees had moved there during the late 1960s, looking for opportunity and prosperity after the Korean War, but they found instead low-wage work in a garment industry that had become dominated by Koreans. By the time they arrived, Korean immigrants had taken over most of the contracting firms from their Jewish predecessors. These immigrants provided a continuous flow of labor for the industry in Brazil, much as they had done in the United States. The majority of Brazil's garment firms are currently owned and operated by Asians, either Korean immigrants or transnational Asian corporations (which located their businesses in South America because of its proximity to U.S. markets). Arriving in this historical context, Lee's parents found themselves pulled into the industry. "It was as if there was no other choice," Lee recalled, "if you were Korean, you worked in garment."

Both of Lee's parents worked in the garment industry, but in order to take care of their three children, the mother elected to work at home, doing piecework sewing. As is common in these types of arrangements, Lee and her sister were expected to help. "Everyone had to pitch in," she remembered. Lee claimed she was four years old when she began to sneak materials from her mother's bag and to secretly construct her own fanciful outfits. As she grew older and her sewing skills improved, she continued to surreptitiously dissect and reconstruct the pieces of mass-market clothing her mom brought home. She recalled:

I was a little girl when I observed the power clothing had on people and on myself. While my rich friends would parade around in designer labels that I couldn't afford, I decided the only way to beat the competition was with creativity. So I snatched pieces from my mom's bag of samples, which were mass market, most of the time ugly, cheap-looking clothes, and started to modify them to suit my taste. That's how I started in design.

Recognizing her talents, Lee's mother encouraged her to pursue a career in fashion. In 1980, Lee set off for New York to study design, but she was ultimately disappointed by the teachers whom she described as "frustrated designers" interested only in "servicing the garment industry with technical workers." Lee confessed that she mostly learned about fashion from "the club scene of the late 80s," where she could experiment with clothing in a culture that rewarded creativity. "It wasn't about how expensive your outfit was, it was about how cool it looked." In 1997, nearly four decades after she started reassembling clothes in her bedroom, Lee opened her own boutique. After just a few years, she had won enough of a following to make her line international, selling to Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Japan. True to the changing tides of fashion, however, her business faltered shortly afterward. In 2002, she returned to her sewing roots and opened a boutique where bolts of fabric and boxes of buttons sit alongside her collection, and where she encourages customers to embellish on her designs or to work with her on creating their own.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from the BEAUTIFUL generationby Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Duke University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2010
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0822349132
• ISBN 13: 9780822349136
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 270
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile