Beautiful Generation

Tu Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu

Description

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.

Sujets

• USA
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 21 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822393689
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

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∫2011 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$

Designed by Heather Hensley

Typeset in Scala by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on

the last printed page of this book.

To my mother

CONTENTS

acknowledgmentsix

introduction Fashion, Free Trade, and the ‘‘Rise of the Asian Designer’’ 1

Part I

1. Crossing the Assembly Line: Skills, Knowledge, and the Borders of Fashion 31

2. All in the Family? Kin, Gifts, and the Networks of Fashion 63

Part II

3. The Cultural Economy of Asian Chic 99

4. ‘‘Material Mao’’: Fashioning Histories Out of Icons 133

5. Asia on My Mind: Transnational Intimacies and Cultural Genealogies 169

epilogue203

notes209

bibliography239

index253

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the time, energy, and imagination of many friends, colleagues, and kind strangers. It is a pleasure to be able to acknowledge them here. I want to begin by thanking all the designers who allowed me to talk with them, hang around their shops, and learn from them. Knowing what I now know about the demands of their work, I am even more amazed that they could find so much time for me. Without their generosity, I would not have this story to tell. The seeds of this book were planted many years ago, but they really grew in conversation with the wonderful colleagues, at di√er- ent institutions, who have read, heard, or talked about these ideas with me, including Christine Balance, Luz Calvo, Derek Chang, Beth Coleman, Iftikhar Dadi, Maria Fernandez, Wen Jin, James Kim, Nhi Lieu, Christina Moon, Viranjini Munsinghe, Mimi Ngu- yen and Minh-Ha Pham (and their spot-on blog, Threadbared), Je√rey Santa Anna, Barry Shank, Julie Sze, Elda Tsou, K. Scott Wong, Shelley Wong, and Judy Wu. Thanks to all their insights, this project became much more than I alone could have imagined. I am indebted in particular to the faculty of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. I joined the department just as I was completing this manuscript, and I can think of few places where I could have learned from more dy- namic scholars. Arlene Davila, Julie Elman, Jennifer Morgan, Crystal Parikh, Anne Rademacher, Sukhdev Sandhu, Nikhil Pal Singh, and Caitlin Zaloom all took time to read drafts, talk through ideas, or to sneak o√ for a drink. Thank you for the direction and