Review: The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion
By Guest Contributor Catherine A. Traywick, cross-posted from Hyphen Magazine
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.”
Page 1 of 3 | Next page