I. Ethnic Chic in Vietnam

A. Globalization = dramatic increase in the frequency, quantity, and importance of flows of people, things, money, and ideas around the globe
B. Homogenization versus heterogenization
C. 1980s-90s: Foreigners "discover" ethnic fashion in Vietnam
D. "Chinese" pajamas

1. 1994: Lan, owner of a downtown boutique
2. 1995: Lan's children send her six women's Chinese-style outfits from the US, these outfits are copied and sold as "ethnic chic" to foreign tourists
3. 1996: Mai, a market trader, adapts Lan's design and sells it to Vietnamese as a Chinese-inspired look
4. Tourists' quest for authenticity ==> hybrid product
5. Cosmopolitan locals have capital (economic, social, and cultural) to adopt "authentic" tradition

 

II. Performance practices (Leshkowich and Jones)

A. Move beyond homogenization v. heterogenization
B. Re-appropriation, characterization, and an exoticizing gaze: us v. them
C. Performance Theory

1. Self created through performance
2. Performance constrained by pre-existing conditions

D. Practice Theory (Pierre Bourdieu): taste reflects position
E. Performance practices attends to interaction between intentionality and positionality of both performer and audience

1. To enhance status, challenge Orientalism, audience must read performance correctly (i.e., according to performer's intent)
2. Reading depends on status relationship

 

III. Asian American Designers and Asian Chic

A. Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, The Beautiful Generation (2011)

1. Asian Chic during the 1990s and 2000s
2. Prominence of Asian American designers, including Phillip Lim, Alexander Wang, Derek Lam, Doo-Ri Chung, and Jason Wu

B. Asian Chic: Tu's reading

1. Asia at heart of fashion's emergence: manteau (Chinese coat) in Paris, 1673
2. What work did Asian Chic in 1990s and 2000s do for Americans?

a. Anxieties about US status
b. Support for US foreign policy
c. Construction of appreciation of difference through sense of distance

3. Content reading of 529 issues of Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, 1990-2005
4. Early to mid-1990s: fascination, yet written fashion concern with authenticity and political correctness

a. "Anthropological" research
b. Models in Asian settings: New York Times, 1993

5. Late 1990s: emphasis on creative labor of Western designers

a. "'reinterpretation' and transformation'" (116)
b. Designers become "individual creative geniuses...at the top of the apparel value chain" (117).
c. Like Said: West knows value of Asia more than Asia does (118)
d. Asia as antidote to modernity in context of fear of Asian economic power: Donna Karan ad, 2003
e. Asia also hypermodern, West as its interpreter

C. Asian American designers

1. Like Yamamoto, Kawakubo, and Miyake, they are represented as expressing a cultural essence as representatives of Asia (130-131)
2. "Aesthetic of intimacy"

a. Kate Betts, Time: Thakoon Panichgul, Derek Lam, Peter Som as Asian, but an Asianness that was hard to pin down
b. Asian American designers express ambivalence about their relationship to their supposed roots, when and what to claim, and when and what to distance (170).

3. Material incentives "'to do something ethnic.'"

a. Asian designers struggle globally, including in NYC
b. Asian governments see Asian Americans as opportunity to rebrand Asia
c. Awards, positive press
d. Easier for Asian American designers to enter markets in Asia

4. Designers depict Asia as home: "instant connection" and "back home"
5. "Asianness for these designers exists not as a collection of signs to be used or discarded, but as a set of practices that have called those vey identities into being, that have materialized them as a resource" (180).
6. To designers, Asianness = mathematical, architectural approach

a. Inspired by the Japanese "Big Three"
b. Ideas about clothed body and sexuality: room metaphor

7. Tu: Arab influence

a. Dynamics of visibility and invisibility
b. Private space in public (194)
c. Miyake examples, page 196
d. Similar aesthetic concerns, but not cause and effect

D. How do we define aesthetic boundaries of culture?

1. "Asia" is produced internationally
2. Asian American designers accept elements of Orientalism, esp. when economically advantageous
3. Clothing as architectural, mathematical, challenging "fashion" ideas of relationship between body and garment (200).
4. Clothing contains and reveals

 

IV. Kinship and Design (chapters 1 and 2)

A. Fashion and profit emerge through gap between creative work (design, glamour) and manual work of sewing

1. Deskilling and feminization of sewing
2. Asian American designers: sewing as intimately connected to design

B. Media coverage emphasizes Asian American designers' kinship: example of Chloe Dao (Project Runway)
C. Designers construct architecture of intimacy -- a mode of working that acknowledges and forges proximity, contact, and affiliation between domains imagined as distinct," namely those of production and design (34).
D. Practical factors fueling emergence of Asian American designers in NYC in context of reduced barriers to entry in global industry (34-5)

1. Japanese designers in 1980s
2. Global expansion of high-end branded clothing
3. Gentrification --> affordable retail in NYC
3. Local labor force
4. NYC's emergence as fashion capital with Fashion Week
5. CFDA seeking new talent to fill generation gap
6. Growth in online venues

E. Opportunity for speculation made possible by:

1. Sewing families

a. Opportunity to develop skill and creativity
b. History of Chinese and Korean immigration and labor: "When popular publications like the Times explain the increased presence of Asian Americans in fashion by stating quite simply that 'the storefront ethic is in their blood,' they fail to see how family and ethnic resources, far more than any inherent cultural characteristics, have given the designers a leg up in an industry where they enjoy few other advantages" (48).

2. Family and ethnic labor connections make it possible to produce in small quantities necessary for start up fashion business

a. Sewing, managing, investing
b. Gift exchange and fictive kin relationships with sewers: "Auntie" and "Uncle"

F. Asian American designers see sewers as skilled artisans worthy of respect
G. Implicit critique of ways that fashion separates and ranks creative and sewing skills (61)
H. Fashion resembles other forms of ethnic entrepreneurship: "Asian American designers have been able to navigate the demands of the fashion industry in part by engaging in small, sporadic acts of exchange that allow them to access important resources and, in doing so, to transform what are usually considered market relations into intimate relations (of kin or culture)" (9).
I. Disadvantages

1. Sewers question designers
2. Designers must accept when things go wrong
3. Designers benefit from sewers' labor, but intimate ties of kinship and ethnicity may obscure power relations --> low wages

J. But, challenges fashion hierarchy and provides room for "the social" to promote agency and respect between sewers and designers: "Ultimately, what designers and workers have done here is to carve out a small space where they can emphasize responsibility, loyalty, and respect -- vague concepts that have far more symbolic than material value" (93).