Fashion is a bizarre business. One of the most absorbing TV programs I’ve seen recently was a rerun of the 2008 BBC documentary Blood, Sweat and T-shirts in which six young, fashion-conscious Britons are sent to India and elsewhere to work in the sweatshops where the goods they habitually buy are made, and for the wages the workers there receive. Typically these are about US$2 a day, or less. Yet the clothes produced are vital to their eventual wearers, both as adjuncts to their beauty and reinforcers of their perceived social status. In the case of the most expensive clothes, the top and bottom of the economic scale are linked in an industry where profits can be stellar, work conditions abysmal, and designer dropout rates notorious.
The Beautiful Generation is a study of Asian-American designers in New York. They mostly rose to prominence in the 1990s, when many young, independent designers set up their own boutique outlets in the area now known as Nolita, implicitly challenging the dominance of the big fashion chains. Many of these new designers were Asian-Americans, and a good percentage of them were women.
It should be said right at the start that this book is unusual among academic products in being very lucidly written, self-critical, and sympathetic to the subjects under survey in a way that doesn’t exclude expressions of doubt about, for example, interviewees’ motives and indeed truthfulness. “My skepticism also needs some investigating,” Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu writes. “Was I suspicious of these accounts because of what these designers were saying, or because of what I believed about the nature of this work?”
Above all, the author is writing about her own kind, and as an Asian-American herself she shows great insight into this particular social group, and into this now rather characteristic Asian-American occupation.
Though many of these designers stood to make considerable profits eventually, they began by living on credit, owing money to investors and manufacturers and being owed money by retailers and individual clients. But when the economic crisis arrived, it was the manual garment workers, not the designers, who were the first to suffer. Overseas competition had reduced their wages and threatened their jobs. As the author writes, “Conditions of crisis, real or imagined, tend only to further marginalize the already marginal.”
The rag trade, in other words, is just one more business that differentiates between those who work with their heads and those who labor with their hands. The fundamental reason for this isn’t the educated looking after each other, attractive as it may be to assume that, but supply and demand. If only very few people were able to sweep the roads, the pay for such work would have to be high.
This is not to say that theories of natural justice cannot intervene and insist that such inequalities are wrong. Many states have paid attention to such arguments, and legislation establishing minimum wages is arguably the best way forward. But there is always the risk that once these are in place employers will simply turn to countries that don’t impose them.
The Beautiful Generation, though, isn’t primarily a protest against such inequalities. The author is naturally aware of them, pointing to how the industry “fetishizes” clothes, presumably in advertising, with attributes such as freedom, romance and luxury, and thereby diverts the public’s attention away from the miserable conditions in which these products are manufactured. But if anything she leans toward the view that, in the same way that Asian-Americans retain family links more keenly than many others, designers and sewers (people who sew, not conduits for liquid waste) tend to retain socially the contacts made as a result of the interdependence of head workers and hand workers at work.
So why did Asian-Americans move into this field when they did? First of all, there’s an important distinction to observe — that between the cult for Asian styles among the fashionable that burgeoned in the US in the 1990s, and the rise of Asian-American designers in the same period. Asian styles had been around before and, with a mixture of the allure of the distant and a feeling for the presumed greater sensuousness of the East, will certainly return. The arrival of Asian-American designers had more prosaic origins — cheap retail spaces, second-generation immigrants’ increased aspirations, and so on.
Elsewhere the author probes concepts of Asian-Americans as inherently modest, racially invisible, but sexually hyper-visible. She observes that all these perceptions are rooted in a single idea, that of concealment vis-a-vis display. Whether these things are true or not, Asian-American fashion designers, she adds, are certainly adept at knowing that concealing parts of the body can be just as suggestive as revealing them.
There’s an interesting aside, at the end of a chapter on Mao Zedong (毛澤東) iconography during the Cultural Revolution, on the celebrated historian Eric Hobsbawm’s observation that fashion designers appear to have an uncanny ability to foresee what the future will be like. It has to be said that they can also get it terribly wrong.
If there is a weakness in this generally enjoyable book it’s that, although it undeniably has a subject, it doesn’t always appear to hold to a theme. But then this is part of the virtue of this admirable writer. Not pressing your material into pre-imagined molds is, after all, a praiseworthy attribute, and nowhere more so than in the academy. Unfortunately this is a place where, at least until recently, such a virtue was frequently more honored in the breach.
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