Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging by Minh-Ha T. Pham (review)

As a scholar and educator of color working in the nascent field of fashion studies, I've followed the way Minh-Ha Pham's writing over the past decade has gradually permeated and threaded together disparate disciplines and topics: critical race theory, media studies, pop culture, Asian American history and fashion theory. Through countless articles and multi-media interviews that explore the interdisciplinary nature of fashion, Pham is also a scholar who is able to navigate the periphery of academic writing with ease. Several years ago, Pham maintained a blog (collaboratively with scholar Mimi Thi Nguyen) that was dedicated to fashion criticism, showing emerging fashion scholars such as myself the creative possibilities of analyzing fashion through a digital platform–but more importantly, in contestation of the Western, white, heteronormative gaze.

All of this is to say that the eventual publishing of Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet was an anticipated indictment of a fashion industry that was, at the time of the book's publication, reaping the benefits of Asian labor and taste in various ways: Vogue had diversified its publication throughout several Asian countries, China had proven itself a force to be reckoned with in the luxury sector, and some of the hardest working personal style bloggers were of Asian descent. So how and why did Asian bloggers fall within the target range of dismissal and insult by renowned fashion publications? Further, what accounted for the dearth of Asian fashion models in Asian market fashion publications? Finally, why is there a general distaste for and devaluation of Asian fashionability in the fashion system? The cumulative result of Pham's interdisciplinary scholarship breaks ground with Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet, showing how neoliberal capitalism in tandem with the prioritized interest of the Western gaze (and taste) generates both profit and hazards for Asian personal style bloggers in the 21^st century, not unlike the documented exploitation and exclusion of Asian labor from a century past.

The cover for this book is deceptively accessible: positioned front and center is one of its primary subjects, Susanna Lau (author of the blog, Susie Bubble) standing in a relaxed pose, dressed in her signature mix matched array of patterns from head to toe. The large, white, boldly faced text of the book's title takes up much of the cover, overlapping Lau's presence (I cannot tell you how many curious looks I received whilst reading this book on the train in New York). The title is undoubtedly provocative and declarative, as the cover's typography works on its own to cleverly support Pham's rebuttal towards the presumed casualness of blogging: personal style blogging (and the "taste work" it necessarily involves) is a highly nuanced labor practice that warrants critical inspection as well as wider recognition for its sartorial and vernacular dexterity.

Starting out, Pham presents a specific course of analysis in the introduction: that the precarious nature of neoliberal aesthetic labor is systematically complicated further for stakeholders of color–specifically Asian personal style bloggers. For anyone working today as a creative freelancer or as a contingent intellectual laborer in academia, this prioritization of precarity may be met with some defense–particularly if we are thinking in terms of intersectionality. But Pham situates her thesis in history, drawing connections to a legacy of Asian physical labor exploitation and how this troubled past has been compounded by gender stereotypes. The reader is consistently reminded throughout the length of the book that Asian bloggers who are navigating the digital economy shoulder an inherited burden of exclusion, devaluation and exploitation, and through distinct techniques of taste work these industrious laborers are pursuing visibility and enjoying success amid socially constructed barriers that their white counterparts remain unencumbered by.

There are three "super bloggers" (bloggers who sit at the upper echelon of visibility and...