Week 6 - It's hip to be Asian

Qiuying Lin (Britney)
ASA 141
Week 6

It's really interesting to know that this asian trend happened in British. As author introduced in the article, woman entrepreneurs who acted as designers and agent played the significant role in the distribution of Asian fashion, especially in the salwear-kameez suit commoditization process. These designer boutiques trained those transnational women with global network and marketing power. Therefore, they made the asian ethnic clothes available to main fashion trend, shifting suits from domestic economy into commoditized global economy. As Parminder concluded, "In all this, the presence and influential cultural agency of these Asian women has shifted European cultural textures, to generate new cultural and consumer styles" (41). Then, many British famous icons were in Asian ethnicized consumption: Queen ordered two tikkaways (a special Indian food) a week, Princess Diana donned salwear-kameez suit... This is happening at many levels of cultural production (many other asian cultures like Chinese silks) in a whole range class arenas. This also is a continuing process, because later generation re- and de-designed the salwear-kameez suit to meet contemporary demand. In order to increase market penetration of these suites in multiply-located, many professionally posted these garments to all over the world and made them available at local retailing agencies, which broke the cultural boundary and standard, because the local agencies mixed their regional culture inside this clothes.

I'm so impressed by these transformative agencies. It's not easy to adapt the local culture when they were under migration. But these women invested effort to make their own culture available in a global way and significantly influenced British consumer culture. I also understand the essential power of fashion industry, which could break the regional boundary, develop cross-culture communication and reflect ethnic pride. I so glad to see the global network is more strong with Asian influence. But I also want to raise a question about the ethnic identity of these suits. When the ethnic clothes are recoded under global trend with different local culture, could they still be considered as ethnic clothes anymore? Does it mean the same thing that British people accept the ethnic clothes and British people accept settlement in their society like the education system?

Queen Letizia of Spain who wears Chinese silk (R), and the first lady of China, Peng Liyuan (L)