Beautiful Generation

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.

“The Beautiful Generation is a pleasure to read and a model of how cultural studies ought to be done. Thuy Linh Nguyen 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, “Exciting and original, The Beautiful Generation exemplifies the best work in the field of cultural studies. Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu reveals the material and ideological struggles behind the constructions of Asianness incorporated into the design, production, and marketing of fashion. She describes how the U.S. fashion industry has been built around racialized, gendered, and sexualized streams of migrants, as well as the complex transnational flows of capital, and she brilliantly argues that it is the ‘architecture and aesthetics of intimacy,’ the fictive and biological kin relations between designers and garment workers, that fuels Asian American fashion design.”—Martin F. Manalansan IV, author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora, “[A] book that brilliantly explores the ascent of fashion’s Asian/American young guns and anchors their success in how they’ve made resourceful use of their connections to the bottom of fashion’s pyramid—the cutters and sewers who assemble the clothes imagined in couture’s luxe halls.”, “The Beautiful Generation exemplifies emerging cultural studies scholarship in that it theorizes the complex intersections of race, immigration, globalization, and culture's contributions to our current neoliberal economy. This highly original study demonstrates the author's strength in navigating interdisciplinarity. . . . Offering new ways to think about meanings of family, the production and consumption of Asianness, and the inequalities built in fashion as it relates to manufacturing and globalization, this book is ideal for teaching and serves as a model for future research.”, “The Beautiful Generation, as much a fashion history as a cultural study, gracefully takes us . . . from Gaultier’s introduction of luxe Chinese coats in seventeenth century Paris, to American Vogue’s strategic establishment of ‘fashion designer as cultural anthropologist’ in the mid-‘90s, and finally to the curiously successfully rise of Asian American designers in the present decade. While it’s all a good read, the last is arguably the highlight of the book; Nguyen Tu’s compelling examination of Asian American designers, whose precarious positions in the industry are plainly defined by their historic exclusion from it, is clearly a point of personal connection for her.”

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.