The Beautiful Generation

Since the 1990s, young Asian Americans including Doo-Ri Chung, Derek Lam, Thakoon Panichgul, and Alexander Wang have emerged as leading fashion designers. They have won prestigious awards, been chosen to head major clothing labels, and had their designs featured inVogue,Harperrs"s Bazaar, and other fashion magazines. As these designers rose to prominence, the fashion world embraced Asian chic. During the 1990s, "Asian" shapes, fabrics, iconography, and colors filled couture runways and mass-market clothing racks. InThe Beautiful Generation, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu explores the role of Asian American designers in New Yorkrs"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 dozens of 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. In an account encompassing the apparel trade in Asia, ads inVogue, and the family lives of sewers, Tu links the rise of Asian American designers to historical patterns of immigration, racial formation, and globalized labor, and to close familial and family-like connections between designers and sewers.