UIF #&"65*'6-HFOFSBUJPO UIF #&"65*'6-HFOFSBUJPO >PF>K>JBOF@>KP BOEUIF @RIQRO>IB@LKLJV PGC>PEFLK 5IVZ-JOI/HVZFO5V ARHBRKFSBOPFQVMOBPP AROE>J>KAILKALK ∫ 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 acknowledgments ix 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 epilogue 203 notes 209 bibliography 239 index 253 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 the diversion. Andrew Ross has seen this work in many di√erent forms and has shaped it in many di√erent ways. It is di≈cult to acknowledge his many contributions, but I hope that he will recognize some of them in these pages. Ken Wissoker saw this manuscript in its most embryonic form and championed it even when it required some great leaps of faith. I thank him, and Leigh Barnwell, for guiding me so gently through the editorial process. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for engaging so carefully and generously with my work, and to the Mellon Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation for supporting this project. Thanks also go to Eva Hageman, my research angel, for scouring the library for images, tracking down permissions and footnotes, and for making my life just plain easier. She pulled this book together when I needed it most. The years of writing this book were some of my loveliest and some of my most challenging. For sharing in all of those times, I thank Jungwon Kim, Victoria (Graci) Brown, Mary Chan, and Lorraine Paterson. My sister- friend, Alondra Nelson, saw it all, heard it all, and spared no amount of wisdom, good humor, and love. Our fifteen years of friendship (and count- ing) has been a constant joy to me. Logan Hill has seen me wrestle with this project longer than anyone. He endured countless conversations, dozens of drafts, foul moods, and crises of faith—all with great patience. I thank him for his sharp editorial eye, his unwavering enthusiasm, and for inspir- ing me with his love of writing. My family would be the first to say that they have no idea what I spend my time doing. I am pleased to finally have something to show them, and to have this opportunity to thank them. I owe so much to my sister, Ai Linh, who always gave me more than she ever had, and to my brother, Duy Linh, who helped me to laugh at everything. My dad, who spent most of his time in this country working on an assembly line, shaped my worldview—and this project—in ways I am only just beginning to understand. Finally, my greatest gratitude goes to my mother, Thi Thi, who always dreamed the best for me, and to my daughter, Myha, who is my best dream. x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Introduction FASHION, FREE TRADE, AND THE ‘‘RISE OF THE ASIAN DESIGNER’’ On December 11, 1990, U.S. o≈cials charged into a nineteenth- century, brick, walk-up apartment building at 247 Mulberry Street in New York City and arrested John Gotti Sr., the suspected leader of the Gambino crime family. Home of the Ravenite Social Club where Gotti and his associates ran their organized crime business, the building stood in the heart of a small residential neighborhood stretching no further than the few blocks running along Eliza- beth, Mott, and Mulberry Streets, on the northern edge of New York’s Little Italy. After Gotti’s arrest, the Ravenite building was sold to the investment group Allied Partners, which immediately knocked down the walls of its cramped rooms and replaced its bricked-up windows with a glass storefront. Before long, they had transformed the notorious social club into a bright new re- tail space. On February 23, 1999, the date of the auspicious lunar new year’s eve, the handbag designer Amy Chan opened her first store in the old Ravenite building. After she hung her logo—a lucky number eight—over the door and made her feng shui adjust- ments, the only hint of the social club left was the cracked black- and-white tiled floor, where New York’s iconic Italian gangsters made their last stand. Chan’s appearance at 247 Mulberry was a sign of changes to come, not just for the Ravenite building but for the whole neigh- borhood. Shortly after her arrival, a host of other designers began replacing its old tenements and boarded up storefronts with shiny new boutiques. Over the course of just a few years, they transformed it into the shopping mecca now known as Nolita. Among those who joined Chan were Anna Kim, Margie Tsai, Elaine Kim, Kazuo Nakano, and Jennifer Wang—second-generation Asian American women who, like so many of Nolita’s pioneers, were eager to try their luck in one of the city’s oldest in- dustries: the clothing business. The prevalence of these women in Nolita and nearby in the also rapidly changing East Village was such that in 2000 The New York Times dubbed the area from the Lower East Side to Tribeca a ‘‘Little Seoul in the making’’ in honor of the ‘‘hip little fashion shops owned and supplied by young Korean-Americans, the daughters of immigrants who have moved on from the greengroceries and dry cleaners of their parents’ generation and entered the fashion world.’’∞ These shops provided a kind of visual proof that the same newspaper’s speculation just five years before was right—we were seeing what the Times dubbed the ‘‘Rise of the Asian designer.’’ Citing the prominence of figures like Anna Sui, Vera Wang, and Vivienne Tam, and the burgeoning number of Asian students at institutions like the Parsons School of Design, the Times had announced in 1995 that ‘‘Asians, whose nimble hands have for decades sewn in factories in the United States and Asia,’’ had now also ‘‘become an emerging force in design.’’≤ The paper did not make clear whether these conditions were causally linked or merely coincidental, but its emphasis on a narrative of transformation hinted that something his- toric was in the making. The Times was right in this instance. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Asian Americans, whose presence in the fashion industry had previously been virtually nonexistent, seemed to be thriving in that field. Their clothes were being regularly featured in the pages of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, W, InStyle, and other door-opening fashion publications. They were winning an unusually high percentage of the prestigious fashion awards, particularly the recently established prizes for new designers. As of 2007, Asian American designers had won eleven of the forty-one Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation awards; they were ten of the forty finalists for the coveted cfda/Vogue Fashion Fund prize.≥ They even nabbed a few of the most coveted honors, including the Swarovski Award for Womenswear, awarded by the cfda (the Council of Fashion Designers of America), which went to Philip Lim in 2007, Doo-Ri Chung in 2006, and Derek Lam in 2005 (between 2003 and 2006, this award was known as Swarovski’s Perry 2 INTRODUCTION Ellis Award for Womenswear). In 2009, Jason Wu won what amounted to a prize when Michelle Obama, after much suspense and speculation, chose to wear his dress to the inaugural balls. And, in perhaps the clearest indica- tion of their status, Asian Americans were tapped to head up major design labels (Peter Som for Bill Blass) and to design capsule collections for mass- market firms (Richard Chai and Thakoon Panichgul for Target).