The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion

by Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu

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.

Genres: Fashion

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Ming Chen]

As an Asian-American person working in the "culture industry" with all its marketplace banalities I feel like this book really explained the historical conditions (trade/immigration policy, migration patterns, and institutional support/lack of) as well as the symbolic order (creative/noncreative, mind/body, self/other, and distance/intimacy) that have given shape to my particular life shaped by an entanglement of family and work that is so characteristic of Asian Americans in the fashion industry specifically.

Aside from lowkey explaining my whole life I also think this book restored my love for fashion by reminding me of an optimistic period fueled by personal storytelling, true craftsmanship, and appreciation for form instead of the shit we see nowadays that looks like it got pasted out of a computer screen.

I think I've got to read this again to suck all the juices out.

[Ietrio]

A shallow work of an academic paper pusher going for the bigger pension plan.

The author can jump like popcorn from the 15th century to the end of the 20th century with no worries. After all the goal seems to build a mystic case. Take chapter 3. A simple case of protectionism is turned on its head to show some dark conspiracy. And the simple fact that cotton and silk can be far nicer to the touch than medieval European wood and badly conditioned leather turns into something about painted flowers, making the whole book a fairy tale with rather passive characters.

[Marnie Becho-Cannon]

Nguyen Tu's discussion of Asian chic and the expectations American culture has put upon Asian fashion is an intriguing read and she sets up a strong argument by combining an analysis of fashion magazines in the 1900's with interviews of Asian American fashion designers.