Times, Tempos, and the Rhythm of Fast Fashion in Los Angeles and Seoul

Fast fashion is often a story about the most powerful global retail giants such as Zara and H&M. The rise and dominance of fast fashion within the United States, however, areintimately tied to the work of Korean immigrant communities within downtown Los Angeles. In the last decade alone, Koreans have refashioned the city of Los Angeles into the central hub of fast fashion in the Americas, designing and distributing clothing from Asia to the largest fast-fashion retailers throughout the Americas. This chapter explores the work of these fast-fashion families who blur the lines between design and copy, author and imitator, exploiter and exploited. How do their modes of work profoundly transform the material object of clothing? How do they complicate the assumed directions and global flows of design and production in the global fashion industry? And finally, what role does risk and failure play—in a landscape of creativity, aspiration, and imagining—to make fast fashion even a possibility?

“Little Freedoms”

This chapterexamines a group of undocumented immigrant women from Nepal who wear fast fashion to labor at their body service jobs in a New York City nail salon. Contrary to the idea that consuming fast fashion is a leisure activity, this chapter suggests that fast-fashion consumption is a mandated form of uncompensated labor. In the case of these workers, they are explicitly required to dress fashionably for a job that is underpaid, toxic, and rough on clothes. Despite this, workers insist that wearing these clothes holds important affective meanings that exceed their boss’s imperative, described by one as “little freedoms.” An investigation of little freedoms points toward the larger structural ways all fast-fashion workers are shaped by this quintessential form of labor under global capitalism; exemplifies the delimited forms of freedom possible within it; points toward important forms of difference between workers; and offers clues to fast-fashion makers’ other, longed for, and potentially more enabling futures.

Beauty between Empires

This chapter examines how and why Korean plastic surgery consumption occupied the minds of Jezebel (a mainstream US feminist blog) writers, editors, and millions of readers as well as Womenlink’s (Korea’s premiere feminist non-profit organization) members, panelists, and forum attendees at roughly the same time from 2012 to2013—feminists from opposite ends of the world so to speak. By closely reading Jezebel’s coverage of the topic and juxtaposing it with Womenlink’s activism in Korea, this chapter examines first, the role of social media sites in US discourses about Korean women’s bodies. How have social media sites renewed fetishized interest in Korean bodies while fueling cosmetic surgery consumption in Korea itself? Second, both groups agree that Korean plastic surgery consumption is a feminist “problem,” yet their differing geopolitical locations and political investments affect their articulation and understanding of this particular problem. How might we think about these two feminist groups relationally?

Cartographic Imaginaries of Fast Fashion in Guangzhou, China

This chapter analyzes how Chinese rural migrants’ participation in the global commodity chains for fast fashion in Guangzhou intersects with their geographic imaginaries of the “global.” Specifically, it examines how migrants come to know the extent of their displacement as low-wage laborers in one of China’s “workshops of the world.” Through ethnographic description, this chapterreveals how migrant laborers’ geographic imaginaries inform the ways in which Chinese migrant laborers come to understand the conditions of their class-based labor and displacement vis-à-vis other market participants along the wider commodity chain. Migrant laborers create mental maps of the commodity chains in which they participate, while they situate their class-based roles along the transnational production chains.

Manicures as Transnational Body Labor

Based on interviews and participant observations with nail salon owners, workers, customers, and advocates, in addition to analysis of media representations, this chapter expands the concept of “body labor” to explore the dynamics of emerging circuits of “transnational body labor” that connect Asian workers to immigrant niches in the United States, and increasingly forge material and aesthetic ties back to Asia.

Splitting the Seams

In 2013, Mangosing created VINTA, a small run of designs that are custom fit for consumers, produced by a single master sewer in Manila, and then shipped back to Toronto for distribution. This chapter reads VINTA amid the easy consumption of global Asian and Filipino labor (from fast fashion to the predominance of Filipina/o caregivers in Canada). VINTA works against these patterns by first emphasizing an individualized experience (a custom-made dress) and second, by attempting to work against a system that relies upon low-paid and “deprofessionalized” Filipino laborers. But VINTA is also only made possible because Mangosing outsources the work to the Philippines. She thus sees VINTA as a combination of a capitalist and feminist enterprise, the results of which are an uneasy negotiation of labor and the diaspora, a feminist project that calls attention to the untidy seams of relations between women in the global North and South.

China: Through the Looking Glass

This chapterargues that the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s China: Through the Looking Glass exhibition provides an exemplary case for studying the ways in which authorship is constituted not simply by the law but by a complex of race, knowledge, power, and emotions. As this exhibition demonstrates, Orientalism is a primary means by which Western fashion designers establish their privileged status as authors, as artistic agents specially endowed with the power of creating and controlling circuits of meanings not just about aesthetics and design but about race, representation, and value. In a strange twist of irony—but one that perfectly encapsulates the illogic of the inverted worldview through the looking glass—Western fashion’s use of Orientalist reproductions of “China” and “Asia” has enabled it to both draw and blur the lines between authors and copyists.

Fashioning the Field in Vietnam

This chapter explores how a state-sponsored fashion show for women in their 40s depicted an appropriate midlife femininity as mature, attractive, self-confident, and mindful of both Vietnam’s revolutionary socialist past and future market prosperity. The event spoke back to global fashion hierarchies by highlighting Vietnam as a source of style, rather than simply a site for manufacturing others’ designs. It also suggested that Vietnamese fashion was on the cusp of receiving international attention—a metaphor for Vietnam’s development more broadly—and that what women wore and how they behaved were central to the attainment of this recognition. These claims were bolstered when, in an unexpected turn of events, the author’s presence at the fashion show generated national press coverage. Examining the “field” of Ho Chi Minh City in the 1990s as a site of ethnographic research encounters, this chapter explores the dialogic and embodied politics of knowledge production that characterize research on fashion in globalizing contexts.

Beauty Regimens, Beauty Regimes

AsianAmerican beauty videos on YouTube uniquely intersect with both domestic racial and economic schemas and the vicissitudes of the global beauty market, making them a unique archive of the operations of global neoliberalism as it articulates through social media and raced and gendered ideas about beauty, makeup, and self-care. Reading a series of Korean and Korean American YouTube makeup tutorials and beauty videos, I argue that these videos reveal a map of connectivities between seemingly disparate global economic and social structures. In particular, they reveal how two striking features of global neoliberalism—the centralizing of women as a global labor and consumer force and the “globalization” of capital as marked by the rise of capitalism in Asia—converge to remap and remake race and gender as global biopolitical schemas.

White Like Koreans

Based on interviews and observations of cosmetics retailers and shoppers at several malls in Ho Chi Minh City, this chapter considers how cosmetics consumption inaugurated a new form of what scholar Jonathan Reinarz termed “skinliteracy” in Vietnam. Though purchases of prestige cosmetics far outpace those of luxury clothing, sales are not easy to come by. Retailers instruct customers to consider a product’s national origins—French, Scottish, Japanese, Korean, and American products were seen as quite distinct—to ensure “suitability” (hop) with their own “Vietnamese” skin. As such, this chapterargues that the language of “land” and “landscape” that dominates discussions of cosmetics works to narrate women’s consumption as a reflection of their nation’s standing, and to foster a feeling and imagination about which nations might serve as “suitable” models and allies. In this sense, cosmetics consumption becomes a way women narrate their experiences of development and their feelings about the modernity enveloping them.