Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu is Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies at New York University. She is a co-editor of Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America, also published by Duke University Press, and TechniColor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life.

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""The Beautiful Generation" is a pleasure to read and a model of how cultural studies ought to be done. Thuy Linh Tu's elegant, well-crafted account of the fashion industry demonstrates the impossibility of separating the aesthetic from the material, or the cultural from the economic. It shows how the changing roles of culture in the global economy can be luminously traced through a focused, interdisciplinary methodology."--Kandice Chuh, author of "Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique"

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the BEAUTIFUL generation

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..................................................................................ixINTRODUCTION Fashion, Free Trade, and the "Rise of the Asian Designer"..........................11. Crossing the Assembly Line: Skills, Knowledge, and the Borders of Fashion.....................312. All in the Family? Kin, Gifts, and the Networks of Fashion....................................633. The Cultural Economy of Asian Chic............................................................994. "Material Mao": Fashioning Histories Out of Icons.............................................1335. Asia on My Mind: Transnational Intimacies and Cultural Genealogies............................169EPILOGUE.........................................................................................203NOTES............................................................................................209BIBLIOGRAPHY.....................................................................................239INDEX............................................................................................253

Chapter One

SKILLS, KNOWLEDGE, AND THE BORDERS OF FASHION

In 2005 fashion fans in the United States were treated to two dramatic media events: the release of Douglas Keeve's much-anticipated documentary, Seamless, and the return of the hit television show, Project Runway. Keeve's behind-the-scenes film examined the harsh realities of the fashion business by following designers as they competed for the first annual CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, a prestigious $200,000 prize awarded to one emerging American designer every year. The stakes were high: the money and exposure could make or break a designer's career. Even though the finalists represented ballyhooed, high-end brands such as Habitual, Libertine, and Cloak, none of them had yet turned a profit, despite reams of press coverage and boutiques stocked with their thousand-dollar dresses. (In fact, several finalists closed their businesses the following year.) The documentary—and the prize itself, established to buttress flagging sales after September 11—was a grim reminder of the odds against making it in fashion, talent notwithstanding.

Project Runway, which also followed designers trying to win a fashion prize, was much more upbeat. Broadcast initially on Bravo, with video confessions and celebrity guests, the show was a reality television competition in which designers competed for a chance to present their work during Olympus Fashion Week. Unlike the Seamless designers, these contestants were judged solely on their ability to make one-off pieces in a series of television-friendly challenges, occasionally for celebrity clients (like the heiress Nicky Hilton) and often out of implausible materials (like flowers).

Though quite different, these two productions had several similarities. Both presented comparable narratives, dramatizing a series of eliminations before unveiling a winner in the last, nail-biting moment. Both capitalized on fashion's glamour, while promising viewers a gritty glimpse behind the scenes. Both featured a significant number of Asian American contestants—a testament to that group's burgeoning presence in fashion. Three of the ten finalists for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund were Asian Americans (Peter Som, Derek Lam, and Doo-Ri Chung), as were three of the sixteen for Project Runway (Diana Kim, Guadalupe Vidal, and Chloe Dao). And the two productions framed their Asian American contestants in oddly similar ways.

In his film, Keeve featured three of the ten finalists for the cfda/Vogue award most prominently: Alexandre Plokhov (designer for the menswear line of Cloak), the team of Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough (designers for Proenza Schouler), and Doo-Ri Chung (for Doo.Ri). While the director scripted all three contestants as similarly talented and hardworking, Chung's story was given a unique treatment. Unlike the other designers, who were shown toiling in their studios alone, Chung was repeatedly presented in the context of her family. When the judges came to view her collection, they were introduced to her parents, who were lingering shyly nearby. (Chung's workshop was actually housed in the basement of her parent's dry-cleaning store, which, in a dramatic turn, burned down during the filming.) In later scenes, Chung is filmed at dinner with her family; they appear again during her runway show. Chung even confessed that it is her mother who sews the zippers on her dresses.

On Project Runway, Chloe Dao, the winner of that season's competition, was presented in a very similar manner. Dao's family too becomes a central part of her story, whereas the families of the other contestants get only passing mentions. When Tim Gunn, the show's resident expert, visits Dao's workshop, he is introduced to Dao's mother, also lingering shyly nearby. Dao still lives with her parents in Houston, where her family emigrated after spending time in a Laotian refugee camp. Dao shows Gunn pictures of her seven sisters; her brand, Lot 8, is named for the eight children. She recounts to Gunn the story of the family's harrowing attempt to escape from the Viet Cong and their subsequent imprisonment in Laos. He is appropriately shocked, and not surprisingly so, given that his previous meeting with one of the finalists consisted of a trip to the mall. Before he leaves, Gunn poses for a snapshot with Dao's entire family.

Why this strikingly similar representation of Asian American designers? If these types of stories were highlighted only to add color to the show's predictable dramatic arc, why not dig for them among all the designers? In one sense, it would be easy to read this through the lens of Orientalism. By framing Chung and Dao in this way, these productions constructed them as typical model minorities—as children of immigrants who work hard and make good. The families, particularly the shy and obviously self-sacrificing mothers, serve to reinforce the idea of traditional Asian values and to highlight how far such upbringing has taken their now-successful children. The sensational headlines that accompany the press coverage about these designers make this clear. A Newsweek article on Chung, for instance, was titled: "Doo-Ri Chung: Rising from the Basement to the Big Time." An US Weekly piece on Dao had the headline: "From Refugee to Project Runway." In addition to constructing them as Horatio Algers of the fashion world, this framing reiterates the argument that Asian American designers should not be seen as individual geniuses like their non-Asian counterparts, but as a product of their families, histories, and cultures.

Orientalism may well be at work here, but there is more than a little truth that families have played a crucial role in the working lives of Asian American designers. While Chung's and Dao's stories appear anomalous within these media productions, they are in fact quite characteristic of the experiences of many Asian American designers. Like Dao, who admits that sewing came naturally to her because her mom was a seamstress, many Asian American designers got their start by learning from their parents, who often worked on the lowest rungs of...