Week 6: Asian Chic and the Portrayal of the Other
May 4, 2019
This week's readings bring in a contemporary lens looking at the trends of 'Asian chic' in the west which has re-surfaced and ebbed since the mid 80's. Cultural exchanges in many ways can be said to make up the skeletal structure of a global fashion, and so often it goes unexamined just how fraught with political power imbalances such exchanges tend to be. For Asian chic in particular during the 2000s, I remember being one of many non-Asians who found topics such as the Kimono or the Salwar-Kameez to be unique and 'fresh' subjects of design. This view of asian fashion ignores not only the long history of these garments in their own respective cultures, but it ignores the history of asian influence in the west dating back to at least the 16th century. Aside from the myopic positioning of this fashion as a recent invention, the depictions of asian influence in fashion and fads created an image of Asia as subservient in its other-ness. Using Asian cultural elements as a supplement not only discredited the work of Asian and Asian-American designers, but it reflected the ways in which western fashion viewed itself more accurately than how the west interacted with Asia.
When I was reading this week's articles, I found myself remembering celebrities such as Gwen Stefani, who notoriously employed 'Harajuku girls' as both token dancers and literal accessories. Stefani created stereotyped characters of the vibrant harajuku street fashion to support her career, which both removed agency of the dancers she employed alongside misrepresenting the incredibly diverse fashion scene in Japan. This to me is the epitome of the problems of the asian chic trend during the mid 2000s. Now, as we move into the second decade of this millenium this type of depiction would not stand a chance of the type of success Stefani was awarded, and instead we are far more likely in a global society to embrace Asian and Asian-American designers and influencers.
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