Tackling the Racial Intimacies that Fashioned a Generation

With the academic equivalent of military prowess, assistant professor of Asian Pacific Studies at New York University Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu flanks the topic of Asian Americans in fashion. Her groundbreaking book explores a wide range of themes: the exponential rise of second-generation Asian American designers in a primarily Caucasian industry; faux kinship structures among those designers and their unrelated Asian laborers; "Asian chic" as seen in stateside fashion publications; the collaboration between China-born, Hong Kong-bred, and New York City-based Vivienne Tam and Chinese artist Zhang Hongtu; and finally, "Asianness" in fashion design.

Tu's work illustrates interdisciplinary academia at its best, not only conquering the topic from all angles but also exploring it through multiple methodologies. For part 1, which relies on ethnography, Tu conducted thirty-two formal interviews with designers, like Gemma Kahng, Eugenia Kim, and Jen Kao, in addition to dozens of informal interviews, between 2001 and 2008. For part 2, Tu turned to visual analysis for her methodology. For her chapter "The Cultural Economy of Asian Chic," she examined 529 issues of Elle, Vogue, and Harper's Bazaar from 1990 to 2005.

In her first chapter, "Crossing the Assembly Line," Tu explores what factors facilitated the rise of second-generation Asian American designers and finds that, despite fashion's strict edict that the labor of creating a garment is separate from and not equal to their design, the line between creation and creativity is not impenetrable. Over 50 percent of the Asian American designers interviewed "learned by watching, practicing, and sometimes helping with the work" of their family members in the garment industry. Subsequently, when these designers began their own lines, they relied heavily on familial support, which ranged from "unpaid help to financial investments and formal employment." Tu critiques the high-low fashion divide, revealing not only its porousness but also how the "low" labor of first-generation Asian immigrants contributed to the "high" fashion of second-generation Asian American designers.

Next, "All in the Family?" examines imagined intimacies between these designers and their unrelated Asian garment workers, who become more like "aunties" and "uncles" than employees or producers. This second chapter dissects how these fake kinships (often composed of individuals with different ethnicities, classes, and genders) betray complex relationships, which vary between generous, mutually beneficial, and quid pro quo.

In her third chapter, "The Cultural Economy of Asian Chic," Tu uses magazines as "cultural intermediaries," to navigate shifting aesthetic movements alongside globalization at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. She illuminates how the idea of what constitutes "Asianness" changes over that relatively brief period, noting how stateside publications regarded "Eastern" fashion in the 1990s as existing in a vast range of geographical locations, from India to Iran to Turkey to Spain, which were later excluded, in the early 2000s.

Tu then picks apart Vivienne Tam's 1995 collection, a collaboration with Zhang Hongtu, in her fourth chapter, "Material Mao." This collection marries Tam and Hongtu's different experiences of Mao and China. Tam's work, which borders on self-exoticizing, could easily be referred to as "China lite," or as Tu writes, an Asian chic free of China's "political complexity, social unrest, and economical hardship." Hongtu's artwork, which primarily revolves around imagery of Mao Zedong, is, on the other hand, fiercely personal, provocative, and critical. In this exploration, Tu examines the intersection of Asian chic and Chinese art, questioning its symbolism and layered meanings.

The final chapter, "Asia of My Mind," investigates how Asian countries, such as China and Korea, have courted and semiadopted Chinese American and Korean American designers as their own through the press and through bestowing prestigious awards. It also explores the "polycultural" influences of Asian American designers, focusing on Japanese designers (the Big Three), as well as on Arab culture.

Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu's extensive and exhaustive research is the backbone of the book, which...