Week 6: Taking Back Culture

Alyssa Vang - ASA 141 - Week 6 - Taking Back Culture

When I first started reading It's Hip to be Asian, it started out talking about how the British Asian women were the top fashion consumers and I wasn't surprised about that because a large amount of products that get commercialized are towards women and most of the time they are the ones shopping. From the start I never knew what the salwaar-kameez suit was called until I read this article and I saw that they were the outfits that I mostly saw when I watch Bollywood movie. I wasn't surprised when I read how it became a popular fashion trend. I feel like Bollywood movies really make the clothing beautifully and that is how people get influenced and would want to wear it as well. What made made me upset was when I read how it started getting into the economy as a sale product, what made me even more upset was how smaller stores that did make the salwaar-kameez were shut down and the larger companies were taking this traditional clothing it making it as a fashion trend. There is a different between selling it for money and selling it because you appreciate the suit and from the looks of the article it looks like it has become a trend without people knowing the background of the culture. Because this suit goes through the industry so fast people don't realize why the people that are selling them, are selling them.

As it says in the

article it is a suit that is represented in a large pride and is a highly political piece. If I were a designer and was creating this piece for sale, I would definitely do  my research on a powerful piece because anything that gets misinterpreted wrong can be the start of a bad reputation as a designer (especially when you want to get out there). This is why I am glad our clothing isn't as expanded because I want to keep the value of our clothes and the embroidery work that represents our story. If I were to expose more of Hmong clothing, I would show it in a way that would keep the respect and value and not let others mass produce to make money. That's why when I see celebrities or others out of the race wear it I get kind of skeptical because I wonder if they know the background of that piece. For example Angelina Jolie's daughter was wearing a Hmong shirt. I wonder if Angelina knew where the shirt came from and how it was made? What if everybody knew the origin of where all the clothing was made. Same thing with when we watched "Good Hair" most of the people that were buying the hair knew where it was from but how it was made and when he revealed how they were done it stoked me because when I saw the child crying because of their hair getting cut it made me sad.