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The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion, by Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. Ix + 272 pages. $23.95 paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-4913-6.
When First Lady Michelle Obama chose to wear the now famous Jason Wu gown for the Inaugural Ball in 2009, the Asian American fashion designer instantly catapulted from obscurity to global recognition overnight. While the world clamored for more information about the relatively unknown design sensation, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu possessed inside knowledge about the various paths Asian American fashion designers like Wu had taken in order to become the successes they are today. In her relevant and timely book, The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion, we discover that Wu, along with other prominent young Asian American designers such as Alexander Wang, Peter Som, Derek Lam, Doo-Ri Chung, and Philip Lim, are part of a cohort of cultural workers that make up the new shifting globalized world of fashion. While this group of fashion designers does not form a coherent movement, Tu suggests that they share "a professional and cultural milieu; a collective desire to create objects of beauty and fascination; and perhaps, most important, a common migration history that shapes their work in strikingly similar ways" (7). Tu's elegantly written, thoughtprovoking book takes readers through important cultural sites of inspiration and production complicating the inextricable interconnections between material and nonmaterial resources, aesthetic and mechanized labor, individual and collective work, and cultural and moral economies at both the local and global levels. She deftly builds upon Angela McRobbies's study of fashion designers and Richard...