Week 6: Hip to be Asian

Week 6

“It’s Hip to be Asian”

Magnolia Garcia

After having read Parminder Bhachu’s It’s Hip to be Asian, I have a number of thoughts
running through my mind. First, it was a pleasure to discover that the international
transferability of ethnic and cultural designs in the 90’s--an entirely new phenomenon--was
facilitated and controlled by Asian women. Considered to be culturally powerful ‘female
aesthetic communities,’ these women were responsible for creating a fast-growing market that
transformed British consumer spaces. [Asian] Women, as central interpreters, shifted European
cultural textures to generate new consumer styles altogether. The most astonishing part of it all,
in my opinion, is the fact that these influences were not only restricted to the middle-class
bourgeois, “. . .applying to a whole range of socio-economic groups” and “. . .transcending
class and ‘ethnic’ boundaries,’” making transnationalism no longer an exclusive concept.

It’s a bit disheartening, however, to find that it has taken “the most fashionable women
. . . the fashion icons of Britain” for the perspective on Asian textiles such as the salwaar-
kameez to be re-contextualized and for its stereotype as a dress of ‘low status immigrant
women’ to change. To equate a cultural garment to a “trend” is demeaning, in my eyes; so, to
find images of Princess Diana wearing Indian textiles so frequently makes me feel a bit
uneasy. To appreciate a culture, in the appropriate context, is one thing, but to continuously
exploit the culture in order to be viewed as an icon wearing “high fashion and couture
garments” is another and quite frankly unacceptable. A question I have in mind, that may be
with or without answer, is: in the eyes of European consumers, what factor dictated the sudden
interest in Asian textiles? What was is about these “icons” that made the garments beautiful
and no longer an ‘immigrant thing’?