Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet by Minh-Ha T. Pham

8/20/2019 Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet by Minh-Ha T. Pham

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Asians

WearClothes

on the

InternetRace, Gender, and the Workof Personal Style Blogging

Minh-Ha T. Pham


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Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet


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AsiansWear

Clotheson the

InternetRace, Gender, and

the Work of PersonalStyle Blogging

Minh-Ha T. Pham

Duke University Press Durham and London 2015


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© Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States o America on acid-ree paper∞

Designed by Natalie F. Smith

Typeset in Quadraat Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pham, Minh-Ha T., [date] author.

Asians wear clothes on the internet : race, gender,

and the work o personal style blogging / Minh-Ha T. Pham.

pages cmIncludes bibliographical reerences and index.

---- (hardcover : alk. paper)

---- (pbk. : alk. paper)

---- (e-book)

. Fashion—Social aspects—Asia—Blogs. . Asians—

Clothing—Blogs. . Fashion writing—Asia—Blogs. I. Title.

.

.—dc

Cover art: Photograph © Camera Press Ltd. / Alamy.


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Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction. Asian Personal Style Superbloggers

and the Material Conditions and Contexts of Asian

Fashion Work 1

Chapter 1. The Taste and Aftertaste for Asian

Superbloggers 41

Chapter 2. Style Stories, Written Tastes, and the

Work of Self-Composure81

Chapter 3. “So Many and All the Same” (but

Not Quite): Outt Photos and the Codes of Asian

Eliteness 105

Chapter 4. The Racial and Gendered Job

Performances of Fashion Blogger Poses 129

Chapter 5. Invisible Labor and Racial Visibilities in

Outt Posts 167

Coda. All in the Eyes 193

Notes 201

Bibliography 219

Index 247


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Writing this book involved a steep and sometimes painul learning curve

that was, by turns, maddening; inspiring; lonely; and crowded with love,

support, and care. My graduate school cohort o riends and allies in the

Ethnic Studies Department at the University o Caliornia at Berkeley weresome o the rst to stand with me as I began this process. Marlon Bailey,

Rebecca Hurdis, Dulcinea Lara, Rani Neutill, Victor Rios, and Gustavo

Guerra Vasquez pushed and inspired me—and continue to do so—to hold

my scholarly and political commitments together in ser vice o one an-

other. Patrick Anderson, Vernadette Gonzalez, Marie Lo, Thy Phu, Oliver

Wang, and Kathy Yep showed me through their examples that intellectual

rigor and intellectual generosity are not only not mutually exclusive but are

in act co-constituting.The subject o this book is ar rom anything I wrote as a graduate stu-

dent (including my dissertation), but I hope that Elaine Kim, Josh Kun,

José Saldí var, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Sau-ling Wong will see throughout its

pages the enormous impact o their rich scholarship and meaningul

mentorship.

Over these past ew years, the care and attention that Lisa Nakamura,

Alondra Nelson, and Thuy Linh Tu have given to reading and commenting

on my research have been invaluable. They have helped me sharpen not onlymy own understanding o this work but also what eminist scholarship is,

Acknowledgments


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vii i Acknowledgments

in practice. With their commitment to sharing their wisdom, never pulling

a critical punch, and always looking and being abulous, they are exem-

plary eminist scholars. I am so grateul to have them on Team Minh-Ha.

Ken Wissoker, Elizabeth Ault, and Cathy Hannabach deserve special men-

tion, too. Whatever strengths this book may have are due in no small part

to their smart eedback and unwavering support o this project through

its many iterations (and, or Ken, across a number o years, lunches, and

shopping trips).

Also deserving o a personal shout-out are those who have ridden with

and or Threadbared as well as Of Another Fashion or so many years. When

I began Threadbared with Mimi Thi Nguyen in , I didn’t expect or

imagine that our online notes and brie commentary about social power

through ashion would nd an audience o any size. I am very thankul

or Threadbared’s smart, engaged, and active readers. Some o our readers

have also become riends and co-conspirators in the critical race and gen-

der blogosphere, the eld o critical ashion studies, and . Lisa Wong

Macabasco, erin Khue Ninh, Latoya Peterson, Jorge Rivas, Jenna Sauers,

Sarah Scaturro, and Jenny Zhang o (or ormerly o ) Hyphen, Racialicious,

Colorlines, Jezebel, Rookie, and the Costume Institute graciously offered

their personal and proessional help in expanding the reach and some-times the scope o my research and writing at crucial times.

O course, the rst reader o any o my Threadbared posts (afer me) is my

co-blogger and riend Mimi Thi Nguyen. It is no overstatement to say that

without her amazing gifs or cultural and social analyses, her experience

with coding, and her willingness to share all o them, Threadbared—

including the research and writing I did in and through Threadbared that

would later become this book—simply would not have been.

For their thoughtul suggestions and criticism o the work at variousstages o its evolution, I want to thank the aculty, students, and members

o the many institutions that have invited me to present my research. Also,

I am grateul or the Society or the Humanities Research Grant at Cornell

University and the Mellon Foundation Research Grant at Pratt Institute

which helped to deray the costs associated with the research and writing

o this book.

I am lucky to have ound a small but super smart, un, and crazy styl-

ish group o riends, allies, and colleagues in and across a range o criticalrace, gender, ashion, and media studies. The conversations, good cheer,


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Acknowledgments ix

and support o Aimee Bahng, Denise Cruz, Tanisha Ford, Sharon Heijin

Lee, Alice Marwick, Ashley Mears, Christina Moon, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Thy

Phu, Priti Ramamurthy, Thuy Linh Tu, and Grace Wang are some o the

topmost scholarly and nonscholarly reasons I love being an academic.

Super colleagues in the Social and Cultural Analysis Department at New

York University, especially Crystal Parikh and Lok Siu, offered me—as a

very green junior scholar—kind remarks and patient advice on embry-

onic drafs o my academic work and a supportive place to share it.

At Cornell University, I could not have asked or a group o better

colleagues than Derek Chang, Viranjini Munasinghe, and Shelley Wong.

Their generous yet exacting comments on various drafs o many o this

book’s chapters—and especially their warmth, humor, and encouragement

throughout the three years I was ortunate enough to have been part o the

Asian American Studies Program (defly and graceully managed by Vlad

Micic)—enriched my work and lie in immeasurable ways. I am so grate-

ul to have been part o this small but mighty crew. In the History o Art

and Visual Studies Department, the eminist scholars Cheryl Finley, Maria

Fernandez, and Jolene Rickard, who do the important work o race-ing

art history day in and day out provided much-appreciated guidance, sup-

port, and warmth. Annetta Alexandridis, Judy Bernstock, Keeley Boerman,Saida Hodžić, Kaja McGowan, Lorenzo Perillo, Verity Platt, Noliwe Rooks,

and Nandi Cohen Suarez shared their time, laughter, ood, and ashion

insights in ways that warmed even the coldest Ithaca months. Shirley

Samuels is a standout colleague at Cornell in general, and especially

or me. Her energy and efforts in helping me navigate the labyrinth o

downtown Ithaca apartments, my rst tenure-track job, and the work-lie

(and Ithaca-Brooklyn) balance were tireless and seemingly limitless.

While my time at the Pratt Institute has been short so ar, there hasbeen no shortage o good ood, good conversations, and strong and super

un collegiality among my new colleagues in the Graduate Program in

Media Studies, specically Jon Beller, Stephanie Boluk, Ira Livingston,

Mendi Obadike, Ethan Spigland, and Christopher Vitale.

During the writing o this book, some o the best times or me have been

when I stopped working on it or thinking about it. Cara Faris, Melissa Fon-

dakowski, Mike Garcia, Spencer and Katya Lum, Liz Madans, Thuy Linh Tu,

and Gustavo Guerra Vasquez are always reenergizing orces and bringerso real talk and real Mexican ood. Thank you, thank you.


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x Acknowledgments

Finally, this book and my world would be unthinkable without my

amily. My parents, Nguy ễn Thị Thọ-Da and Phạm Minh Tân, provided

strength, patience, and distraction or a writing process they did not al-

ways understand but always supported. My brother Son and sister-in-law

Jina (who has never elt like an in-law); my sister Hai (who has always been

more than a sister) and brother-in-law Robin; and Brian, most o all, have

lived with and through the many twists and turns o the job market and

writing process. Their laughter, constancy, and willingness to listen while

I moan about it all are the reasons I nished writing this book. Also their

promises o good Vietnamese ood, sushi, and cake—those helped, too.

This book is dedicated to Anam, who entered this world breathless and has

been giving me breath ever since.


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On October , , Susanna Lau—a London-born Hong Konger who

is better known online by her childhood nickname, Susie Bubble (because

she was always in her own little world)—posted a series o photographs

o hersel wearing lilac-and-pink-striped, s-era cocktail pajamas (seegures I. and I.). Shortly afer the post went up, the owner o the small

vintage clothing store in London where she purchased the pajamas was

inundated with inquiries about the outt. The owner recalls: “My phone

was ringing off the hook. People called me rom all over the country and

beyond asking me or those pyjamas!” As well as beneting retailers, Lau’s

taste or out-o-the-box styles o dress (such as vintage pajamas as daywear)

has also launched the careers o little-known independent designers. The

New York Times reported, “Her nds have snared the attention o chains likeTopshop; last year the company snapped up Angie Johnson, the [Cana-

dian] designer o I Heart Norwegian Wood, one o Ms. Lau’s discoveries, to

create a line or its stores.” Rumi Neely, a mixed-race Japanese American,

wields the same kind o sales-boosting power. Sales surge any time ashion

companies like Forever and Myer (an Australian department store) ea-

ture her in their advertising campaigns. Chris Wirasinha, coounder o pop

culture web channel pedestrian.tv, rightly observes, “I Rumi likes your

brand, it’s probably worth more than a Harper’s Bazaar or a Vogue mention.”

Introduction.

Asian Personal Style Superbloggers and the Material

Conditions and Contexts of Asian Fashion Work


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Other bloggers like the Korean American Aimee Song and the Taiwan-

ese American Tina Craig (who coauthors the blog Bag Snob with ellow

Taiwanese American Kelly Cook) have an impact on sales simply by wearing

their avorite clothes. Song has boasted that clothes she photographs her-

sel wearing and posts to the photo-sharing site Instagram, where she has

more than a million ollowers, usually sell out that day. Although Craig’s

blog ocuses on handbags, a Twitter photograph o her wearing DL

premium denim jeans not only caused a spike in sales or the company, italso launched a capsule collection called DLxBagsnob (in which a pair

o jeans retails or $–$). The Vietnamese American blogger Wendy

Nguyen’s “Promise” bracelet, designed in collaboration with Tacori (or

whom she is also the brand ambassador) has become a top-selling item

or the American jewelry company. The bracelet with its intertwined silver

and yellow gold has also ound a receptive audience among A-list celebri-

ties like Jay Z, who purchased it as a Valentine’s Day gif or his superstar

wie, Beyoncé.

. and . Susanna Lau in vintage cocktail pajamas, Style Bubble, October , .


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Lau, Neely, Song, Craig, and Nguyen are part o an elite class o personal

style bloggers whose tastes—represented primarily by the ashion garments

and accessories they buy, wear, style, describe, admire, and broadcast on

their personal blogs—carry an inordinate amount o cultural and economic

inuence. Like all personal style bloggers, they post photos o themselves

wearing clothes, ofen accompanied by text describing the occasion or

wearing the outt, styling tips, or product reviews. They also share details

o their personal lives that help contextualize their unique ashion per-

spectives. Lau has hinted on her blog that her signature eccentric style

o combining “clashing” prints, colors, and categories o clothing (or ex-

ample, sportswear and ormal wear, or sleepwear and sportswear) “was

initially an act o rebellion against my parents and the ‘popular’ people

at school.” (Throughout her blog, Lau openly, i o andedly, attributes

her eelings o childhood alienation to her racial difference.) Nguyen’s

adolescence—spent rst in poverty as a Vietnamese immigrant, whose

parents worked in the garment industry and later in the Caliornia oster

care system—provides the tacit or overt backstory or all o her blog posts.

Her personal history rerames how we understand her penchant or oaty,

diaphanous dresses and other similarly eminine items. Her romantic and

generally conservative style has a cheerul, even indomitably optimistic,spirit when viewed in light o her tumultuous past. In one post she acknowl-

edges that her personal style blog helps her to “heal rom some o the

emotional scars” o her past.

Broadly speaking, personal style blogs represent an individual’s taste.

Unlike the clothing eatured in ashion museums or in retail spaces that

is displayed on mannequins or on hangers, the clothes in style blogs are

personal. They are worn on a real person’s body, and they reect a prac-

tice and convey an idea o sel-composure. Clothes on personal style blogscommunicate a personal style o dress as well as a style o identity and o

lie. They constitute what Joanne Entwistle terms “situated bodily prac-

tices.” Which garments bloggers wear and how they style them articulate

a unique relation between the body and the individual’s experience o ev-

eryday lie. This approach to the media representation o clothing distin-

guishes personal style blogs rom other popular genres o ashion blogs.

The street style blog (or example, The Sartorialist, Street Peeper, and

Jak & Jil) presents a more panoramic view o ashion. It is concerned with


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representing the material, cultural, and aesthetic landscape o a city rom

a ashion perspective. It is not unusual, then, or most o the people ea-

tured in street style blogs to be unnamed and not described with any per-

sonalizing details. The primary unction o street style blog images is to

represent a ashion city, not a ashionable individual. The personal style

blog is also distinct rom the ashion news aggregate blog (such as The Cut

and Business o Fashion), which ocuses more on collecting and sharing

links about ashion than on creating new content. These are lter blogs

that presur and presort the Internet or interesting, relevant, and recent

news items. The personal style blog, street style blog, and ashion news

aggregate blog are the three most common types o ashion blogs, but

there are a number o derivative and minor genres including microblogs

hosted on Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter that are image-heavy and, more

ofen than not, image-only presentations o personal style; blogs ocused

on ashion criticism like my own coauthored Threadbared; and blogs that

combine elements o various genres o ashion, ood, cooking, and liestyle

blogs. All ashion blog genres contain blogs that are independently owned,

corporate owned, or some combination o the two.

The personal style blogs I’m concerned with in this book have a distinct set

o common eatures. First, they are all privately owned and operated (thoughas they have become more successul, many have acquired noncontrolling

corporate support). Second, they are run by Asian bloggers based mostly in

the United States, although some o them are in the English-speaking Asian

diaspora in England and the Philippines. And third, they constitute a highly

select group o superblogs. By this, I mean that they are among the most

elite blogs according to a variety o metrics, including online traffi c; num-

ber o reader comments; number o subscribers or ollowers; the quantity

and quality o ashion industry invitations, collaborations, and media at-tention that they attract; and their high name recognition. The blogs that

are the ocus o this book make up a very small and incredibly select group

o personal style blogs that have the lion’s share o inuence and atten-

tion with respect to both the online public and the ashion industry. How

did this group o Asian superblogs rise to such prominence in the early

twenty-rst century? How did the ashion tastes o more or less ordinary

Asian consumers come to have such signicance in the new economies o

mainstream Western ashion media and consumer markets? And how doAsian superbloggers’ digital practices work to rearticulate race and gender


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as aesthetic strategies o value rather than locations o social difference? In

other words, how are their personal style blogging practices (such as sel-

ashioning, posing, and writing) modes o taste work that turn their styles

o gendered racial embodiment into cultural, social, and economic capital?

These questions rame my investigation o Asian superblogs.

To begin, it is necessary to clariy what I mean by taste. I draw on Pierre

Bourdieu’s amous statement that “the idea o personal taste is an illusion.”

What he meant is that our personal tastes are shaped by and reect our

social position and social context. Bourdieu argues that the expression

o taste, materialized through our manners, comportment, speech, styles

o dress, and other consumer choices, is a practice o sel-classication:

“Taste classies, and it classies the classier.” Our tastes locate us in a

particular social context that is itsel structured by a system o sensibilities,

dispositions, and values (what Bourdieu terms “habitus”). Thus, an analy-

sis o the tastes o Asian superbloggers is an analysis o the social reality

that creates the conditions or their taste as well as the cultural economic

context that gives value to it. It asks both what is Asian taste in the context

o early twenty-rst-century ashion, and why do ashion consumers and

the ashion industry have such a taste or it?

Above I described personal style blogs as representations o individualtaste. But with respect to superblogs, the blogger’s personal style and taste

are not simply represented. As I have already indicated, elite Asian bloggers’

tastes do a great deal o work. Their taste practices are value-producing

activities that generate a signicant though highly uneven amount o cul-

tural, social, and sometimes nancial capital or the blogger and or vari-

ous entities in the ashion industry. As the ashion blog phenomenon has

spread to the mainstream, ashion companies have become increasingly

savvy about monetizing superbloggers’ ree taste labors (which involvecreating media publicity, building consumers’ interest and trust, and ash-

ion modeling). Sometimes their savviness verges on the ethically dubious,

as was the case when the luxury handbag company Fendi borrowed the

“BryanBoy pose” (the signature pose o Filipino queer superblogger Bryan

Grey Yambao) in its international ad campaign without crediting or com-

pensating him. (I discuss this event in greater detail in chapter .)

In addition to producing economic value, Asian superbloggers’ tastes

produce economic relations between bloggers and readers and betweenbloggers and industry insiders. Although bloggers blog or ree and readers


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read blogs or ree, and although bloggers and readers have more or less

equal social standing as ordinary ashion consumers, a superblogger is

able to economicize readers’ activities by turning their consumption o the

blog and their admiration and emulation o the superblogger’s taste into

cultural, social, and nancial capital—or example, when readers click on

affi liate links embedded in a blog post.

To examine Asian superbloggers’ online taste activities as value-producing

work is to place them in the longer historical context o Asian ashion work.

In doing so, I want to extend the notion and history o Asian ashion

work into the digital realm. This will serve to draw out the evolving roles

that race, gender, and class play in structuring work opportunities and

constraints or Asian ashion workers at a time when nonmaterial com-

modities (such as blogs and taste) have become so central to the ashion

industry’s accumulation o capital.

One of These Is Much Like the Other

The Asian ashion worker—the designation likely brings to mind images

o sewing machine operators; o an exploited and inormal emale work-

orce; and o a largely contingent Asian diasporic labor market concen-trated in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the United States that has been

the global backbone o ashion manuacturing or the past sixty years. The

work practices and conditions o this Asian ashion worker—the garment

worker—are characterized by the brutal physicality o long hours, hot and

poorly ventilated buildings, bent backs, tired bodies, and nimble ngers.

Since the late s, the Asian ashion superblogger has emerged as a

new kind o Asian ashion worker. The bloggers’ online activities gener-

ate indirect and direct value or themselves and various entities connectedto the ashion industry. In contrast to the earlier proletariat notion o the

Asian ashion worker, the superblogger is considered to be part o a new

Asian creative class. Instead o being seen as unskilled and oppressed, su-

perbloggers are described in terms that emphasize their imagination, in-

genuity, and vision. For example, when The Business o Fashion, a highly

respected ashion news aggregate blog, kicked off its popular column “The

Business o Blogging,” the rst three prole stories eatured Asian super-

bloggers: rst, Susanna Lau; second, Tommy Ton, a Vietnamese Canadianstreet style blogger and photographer; and nally, the Taiwanese American


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handbag bloggers Tina Craig and Kelly Cook. The stories ocused on the

bloggers’ artistic vision as the driving orce o their productions. In Ton’s

prole, the writer admired the blogger’s “well-trained ashion eye” and his

aesthetic sense or capturing “the little details” in his “landscape-style

images,” “a towering Louboutin stiletto here, a pop o colour there.” In

Lau’s prole, the writer quotes Lau as saying that her product is “my eye,

my point o view, a certain taste, a certain way o documenting and pre-

senting ashion.” Ton’s taste or the little aesthetic details and Lau’s taste

or “documenting and presenting ashion” are understood in these media

proles to be work practices, highly skilled ones that are neither widely

possessed nor easily learned. The high level o Ton’s and Lau’s taste work

is what separates the wheat rom the chaff, the everyday hobbyist blogger

rom the superblogger.

Implicit in these descriptions is a conceptual ramework that separates

head labors rom hand labors, creative work rom physical work. Accounts

o Asian superbloggers’ taste work as creative work, as intellectually and

artistically innovative practices, are partial and misleading. They elide the

ways in which taste work is physical, instrumental, and socially and cultur-

ally conditioned. Yet as narrow and inadequate as these interpretations

o Asian superbloggers’ taste work are, in some ways they are also reresh-ing and even possibly oppositional takes on Asian labor.

The Asian creative worker is a relatively new mainstream idea. Long-held

Western stereotypes o Asian workers perceived them as unimaginative;

docile; and predisposed to perorm rote and repetitive, i demanding,

work. In recent years, a spate o media and scholarly attention has ocused

on the Asian creative class, particularly ashion bloggers, YouTube video

makers, maverick ches, ashion designers, and sofware start-up ounders.

The literature on the Asian creative class coalesces around several themes:the mobility o second- and third-generation Asians away rom traditional

Asian occupations and denitions o success; a celebration o Asians’

newound individualism and reedom rom—and, in many cases, rebel-

lions against—so-called Eastern models o collectivist subjectivity; and the

end o racial stereotypes as we know them (or example, new images o cool

Asians are thought to supplant stereotypes o Asians as nerds). The un-

derlying message in all these discussions is that or these Asians, race no

longer poses social, economic, cultural, or personal obstacles. In effect,creativity and entrepreneurialism are perceived as social ladders that lead

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younger Asians out o blue- and pink-collar labor sectors. These sectors—

which cross transnational boundaries and include domestic ser vices, ap-

parel manuacturing, and electronics assembly—have ofen been the

only labor markets available to rural, immigrant, poor, and undocumented

Asians.

Represented as personalities, productive Asian hipsters rom the You-

Tube beauty guru Michelle Phan to the pot-smoking, accidental multi-

millionaire graffi ti artist David Choe are imagined to embody a different

relation to capitalism: one based not on gendered racial stereotypes but on

individual talent. Asian creatives supposedly signal an entirely new vec-

tor o Asian labor history that is rooted in ree expression rather than ex-

ploitation. Countless mainstream media articles and blog posts assert that

the rising prominence o Asian creatives represents a denitive shif away

rom previous racial labor identities and markets. One such article writ-

ten by Richard Florida, best known or his assertion that creativity is the

new engine o capitalist production and urban renewal, begins this way:

“Many in the West think o the Asian Pacic as the world’s actory.” The

rest o the article is dedicated to smashing that perception. For Florida, the

Asian actory worker is an embodiment o an earlier ormation o Asian

labor that has now been superseded. Florida and other writers and scholarscontrast the earlier Asian actory worker with the creative entrepreneur.

Whereas Asian actory labor is closely monitored and controlled, Asian

creative labor is ree and sel-managed. Whereas Asian actory labor is ex-

ploitative and alienating, Asian creative labor is expressive and personal.

The category o the creative class embodies an implicit ideological as-

sumption about the democratic and even liberatory properties o creative

work. Framed by ideas o individualism, agency, meritocracy, postracism,

and liberal multiculturalism, creative work and success in the so-called neweconomy is understood as ueled by individual drive and intellectual capac-

ity rather than capital, credentials, and other institutionally conerred priv-

ileges. Following this logic, a person’s race, ethnicity, gender, and class do

not hinder access to success in creative economies. They may even be as-

sets. Re-presented through taste work practices (sel-ashioning, sartorial

styling, posing, and so on) race, ethnicity, and gender can be rearticulated

as aesthetic positions or ashion statements that add to and enhance the

value o one’s identity as a personal style blogger in the new digital ashionmedia economy.


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Asian web stars stand out as success stories in the digital realms o cre-

ative economies. In mainstream media outlets like the New York Times and

the Huffi ngton Post as well as popular arts and culture blogs like Hyper-

allergic, much has been written about Asian creatives’ talent, charisma,

capacity to build social networks, and unique but universally appealing per-

sonal brand. The common implication is that the new economy o in-

ormational or networked capitalism is ar more egalitarian than the old

economy o industrial capitalism that still persists in more ormalized

labor sectors like the manuacturing and lm and tele vision industries.

Under inormational capitalism, the increase and diffusion o productive

orces, particularly as a result o new user-driven media technologies and

knowledges, have purportedly democratized economic processes. Old bar-

riers to success like race, ethnicity, class, gender, and lack o capital can

be overcome with a certain measure o stick-to-itiveness and social media

savvy. A Huffi ngton Post story points out that “discrimination, stereotypes

and exclusion are the norm or Asians, both on tele vision and the silver

screen” but “social media . . . amplies otherwise unheard-rom popu-

lations and creates an equal playing eld or ethnic minorities. In this

realm . . . Asian Americans (and cats) dominate.” Asian web stars—

personal style superbloggers being some o the most highly visible amongthem—seem to be evidence o the new and more equitable race and labor

relations under inormational capitalism.

My book pushes against the assumptions o upward postracial mobil-

ity that structure popular understandings o the new Asian digital creative

class. Rather than seeing personal style blogging as an altogether new and

postracial job category, I situate it within the longer historical trajectory o

gendered racial ashion work. Focusing on Asian personal style bloggers’

practices and conditions o taste work, I highlight the historical conti-nuities and discontinuities in the social and economic processes shap-

ing new modes o Asian ashion labor. My aim is to demonstrate that the

roles race, gender, and class play in structuring work opportunities and

constraints under inormational capitalism are evolving, not diminishing.

Throughout this book, I examine Asian personal style superbloggers as

workers rather than digital artisans, high-tech bohemians, or even imma-

terial laborers. These latter categories o labor—occupations involved in

Florida’s lauded gentrication processes—do not adequately capture thestructural similarities that both cut across and link the class relations

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between new and earlier orms o ashion work that I am concerned with

in this book.

Personal style bloggers as a group trouble distinctions between imma-

terial and physical labor, and between innovative and instrumental labor.

Whereas digital artisans and high-tech bohemians are explicitly marked as

middle-class categories, personal style bloggers are not so easily character-

ized. Some come rom middle-class backgrounds, but others do not (as

is reected in the style-on-a-budget blogs that eature clothes purchased

rom ast ashion and big-box retailers). For most bloggers, blogging con-

stitutes a second-shif job, with all the gendered implications that term

entails. All bloggers blog or ree, and the most successul o them blog or

more than eight or ten hours each day (again, this is ofen in addition to

the hours they work at their “day job”).

Furthermore, though they are digital or immaterial laborers, they are

also embodied ones. They generate visual, textual, and aesthetic inormation

that is located and stored in disembodied and distributed networks o algo-

rithmic unctions, personal computers, and data centers. Yet these digital,

immaterial, or cognitive laborers are not laborers without bodies. Personal

style bloggers’ work practices involve the physical labors o posing; sel-

adornment; and shuttling between their homes, photo sites, and retail sites.Asian personal style bloggers are especially diffi cult to categorize in

terms o conventional labor classications. Asian superbloggers are im-

material or inormational laborers, yet their gendered racial bodies are o

particular importance to their work in this historical period o global ash-

ion capitalism. Their participation in the blogosphere as well as their in-

corporation into the dominant Western ashion industry are conditioned

to a great extent by the cultural economic value o their Asian bodies in this

moment that many regard as the Asian decade, which began around .(Diane von Furstenberg and others, including the Financial Times, are con-

vinced that the Asian decade is really the start o the Asian century.) As I

will explain below, the rise o Asian ashion superbloggers has occurred at

a time when the ashion industry and its various taste makers have a taste

or Asian tastes.

This book is inarguably indebted to the many insights that digital and

immaterial labor studies provide into the new organizations and meanings

o work in inormational economies. However, too many critical concep-tualizations o immaterial labor are limited because they ignore race as a


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variable in the quality and conditions o inormational or knowledge work.

Terms like electronic sweatshops and digital plantations are requently used to

describe the exploitative conditions o immaterial or inormational labor.

But sweatshops and plantations do not simply name diffi cult workplaces.

They designate a racially gendered system o labor organization in which

owners, managers, and manuacturers dehumanize specic groups o

people to extract surplus value. Race and gender shape work opportunities

and constraints in physical as well as digital arenas, and scholars who ig-

nore this risk treating Others’ experiences as no more than colorul meta-

phors. Indeed, the historical specicity o these terms is emptied out when

the sweated labor in question is that o, say, English-language Wikipedia

editors (who are overwhelmingly white and male) or when netslaves reers

to the volunteer community leaders and chat hosts who in sued

the Internet giant or back wages.

The insights that scholars like Lisa Nakamura, Minoo Moallem, Nishant

Shah, and Kalindi Vora have provided into the uneven ows and inequi-

table distributions o technical capital (whether skills, resources, wages,

knowledge, or time) represent some o the most interesting and important

work on race, gender, digital labor, and economies today. Collectively,

their research draws critical attention to the historical links connectingmaterial bodies and relations with digital technologies, practices, and

economies. But their discussions o Chinese gold armers in World o

Warcraf, iPhone girls, electronic assembly plant workers, call center oper-

ators, carpet weavers, and puppeteers ocus on proletarianized—or at least

nonelite—classes o workers. The structural marginalization these work-

ers experience in digital economies is reective o and compounded by the

racialized and gendered materiality o their bodies.

The Asian superbloggers I ocus on here are a racially gendered labororce with an inordinate amount o status, inuence, and cultural power.

This class o style bloggers represents not simply the percent but some-

thing closer to the . percent o bloggers who have more than the lion’s

share o online traffi c, readers, inormal and ormal support rom ashion

industry insiders, corporate sponsorships, and personal resources. Their

high visibility in an economy in which attention is currency is what has

made them ready examples o the postracism o the digital era.

However, I insist in this book that Asian personal style blogger is not apostracial or postpolitical labor identity but instead a historically situated,

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12

racially gendered and class-based ormation. As with Asian labor in gar-

ment manuacturing industries, the labor o Asian personal style super-

bloggers is shaped by larger geopolitical, economic, technological, and

cultural structures. Asian superbloggers’ work is nonmaterial, but it is not

removed rom the material reality and constraints o ashion economies,

social relations, and work opportunities that include the inequalities o

race, class, size, and gender presentation that have always structured

ashion work. The blogosphere is just as racially stratied as earlier ashion

labor markets, though it exhibits a somewhat different pattern and logic o

stratication.

The difference has to do with the emergence o key luxury ashion mar-

kets in Asia, the new meanings and signicance o Asianness in the Asian

decade, the relative privilege o Asian ashion blog workers in relation to

garment workers, and the aesthetic and personal nature o bloggers’ taste

work compared to the impersonal work o apparel manuacturing. What’s

more, elite bloggers have technological, cultural, and economic resources

that industrial ashion workers simply do not. Indeed, the very work and

success o Asian superbloggers rests on the promoting and buying o com-

modities that Asian garment workers (and electronics assembly workers)

produce under highly exploitative conditions. Asian superbloggers, garment workers, and electronics assembly workers are linked together in a strange

circuit o production in which one group’s ree, highly visible, and reward-

ing labor (because it offers outlets or sel-expression, creativity, and social

connection, as well as the possibility o lucrative side work) depends on

another group’s ree or severely underpaid, invisible, and largely alienat-

ing labor. Put differently, the emergence o this new orm o Asian ashion

labor (personal style superblogging) is constitutive o and constituted by

the continuation o an older orm o Asian ashion labor (garment work).Yet both are positioned—hierarchically—in ashion’s productive system as

a racially gendered supply o unwaged or underwaged labor.

While I ocus on the ways in which the structural position o these two

groups o Asian ashion workers overlap, I do not want to lose sight o a un-

damental reality: there are vast differences between industrial and im-

material ashion work and the conditions that shape each worker group’s

experiences and activities. In some ways, their differences are so great

that a comparison might seem implausible. Substandard work conditions,declining wages in leading apparel-exporting countries, and the physical


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degradation o workers’ bodies (including verbal, physical, and sexual abuse

by actory managers) are structural realities or apparel manuacturing

workers. Bloggers do not experience these, even in the worst circumstances.

Despite these important differences, Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet

argues that Asian personal style superbloggers are connected to Asian

garment workers—though not in the same way that other Asian ashion

workers are. In The Beautiful Generation, Thuy Linh Tu observes that Asian

American designers acknowledge and create relationships to garment work-

ers that, or some, are based on amilial histories intimately connecting

the designers to the garment or apparel manuacturing industry. Whether

amilial or chosen, Tu explains, the kinship relations between Asian Amer-

ican designers and Asian suppliers and sewers who become so-called

aunties and uncles challenge the ashion industry’s “logic o distance” (in

Tu’s ormulation). These relationships, or her, “acknowledge proximity,

contact, and affi liation between domains imagined as distinct.” Asian

superbloggers do not identiy with or demonstrate any apparent sympa-

thy or the hundreds o thousands o Asian industrial ashion workers

around the globe who produce the material and technological products on

which blog labor relies. Not only do superbloggers not acknowledge cul-

tural, amilial, or other intimate connections with the people who makethe clothes eatured on their blogs, but—as I discuss in chapter —they

sometimes use the digital resources and digital work practices available

to them to maintain a divide between head and hand, or innovative and

instrumental, labors. Yet a structural examination o Asian ashion work

and the productive systems and modes o ashion capital accumulation it

sustains and that sustain it reveals that these two groups o Asian ashion

workers have similar material and social positions in ashion’s productive

economy.This book traces how the work practices and working conditions o

Asian superbloggers and Asian garment workers—specically with re-

spect to their gendered and racialized implications—link them in spite o

their differences. Thinking about these two groups together reveals as-

cinating insights into the ashion industry’s changing and enduring divi-

sions o labor, opportunity, recognition, and rewards as it is shifing rom

a manuacturing-based economy to one based on inormation or commu-

nication. Inarguably, the material conditions and social relations o powerthat dened ashion labor under late twentieth-century capitalism are

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14

different rom those dening ashion labor under early twenty-rst-century

inormational capitalism (more on this below). This book shows, however,

that there are historical continuities in the racial and gendered dimensions

o patterns o employment opportunity, wage gaps, and labor systems,

suggesting that conditions o ashion production in the digital age have

much in common with those in earlier stages o global industrialization.

Economies of Asian Industrial and Informational Fashion Work

Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet demonstrates the complementarity o ash-

ion’s inormational and industrial labor systems without conating the

two. To begin with, both systems have low start-up costs, require little to no

prior training or experience, pay workers less than a living wage or physi-

cally taxing ull-time jobs, prevent unionization through decentralization,

discourage workers’ collective identication through individualizing tasks

and reward systems, and in general exploit workers. Additionally, Asian

women and girls have played a signicant role in both the early twenty-

rst-century and late twentieth-century ashion industries—suggesting a

shared racial and gendered organization o ashion labor across two very

different modes o work.The entry and participation o Asian garment workers and superblog-

gers in both ashion production systems are results o broader shifs in

global capitalism. In the s, the ashion industry was transormed by

the same neoliberal ideologies and policies that had begun to transorm

various U.S. economic and cultural sectors. Neoliberalism’s inexorable

march through the s and s cast unions as bureaucratic impedi-

ments to workplace effi ciency and promoted unobstructed corporate

expansion as an intrinsic right under ree market capitalism. Neoliberalpolicies spurred the rapid growth o transnational corporations and in-

creased global production o export goods by some o the poorest coun-

tries and people in the world. It was in this late twentieth-century period

that Asians, mostly Southeast and South Asian women and girls and im-

migrant Asians in the United States, rst entered the ashion labor orce

in large numbers.

The second phase o ashion’s economic restructuring— which I argue

is not entirely divorced rom the rst phase—began in the early s. Thistwenty-rst-century phase is marked by a conuence o several technologi-


24/48

cal, social, and economic changes: the mass distribution o personal digital

technologies, the rise in the use o social media, and the nancial

crash and recession in Europe and the United States that caused the ash-

ion industry to turn its attention to Asian consumers as a new luxury

market. English-speaking Asian ashion bloggers rose to prominence in

the midst o this recession, enabled by these new technological, political,

and economic transormations.

In , at the dawn o the Asian decade, Asian personal style blog-

gers embodied ashion’s new ideal consumer, and they unwittingly became

inormational intermediaries. Their blogs provide consumers, retailers,

and designers with an easily accessible storehouse o up-to-the-minute

inormation about style trends and consumer values. A ew words and

photographs posted to high-ranking Asian personal style blogs like Lau’s

Style Bubble or Neely’s Fashion Toast have enhanced the cool cred o es-

tablished brands while training a high-powered social media spotlight on

emerging designers and little-known ashion retailers. As representative

consumers o a newly signicant luxury market, these bloggers’ observa-

tions are o particular interest to ashion companies that are working hard

to capture Asian consumers’ attention and disposable income. The grow-

ing numbers o Asian models on ashion runways and in magazines—arelated phenomenon in the Asian decade—can also be attributed to the

new signicance o Asian markets to the Western ashion industry. As

Ivan Bart, the senior vice president and managing director o Models

Worldwide, explains, “it comes down to getting consumers to come to

your brand. You have to have aces that reect the consumer.” Asian su-

perbloggers have aces that reect the new ideal ashion consumer and do

the work o promoting brands or a great deal less money than commercial

ashion models or, more ofen than not, or ree.Asian eminized labor has been integral to the ashion industry’s

global expansion and development throughout the late twentieth and

early twenty-rst centuries. What is popularly described as an historical

novelty—the Asian moment (beginning in the mid-s)—has a prece-

dent in the early years o neoliberal globalization in the s and s. In

both cases, the production o ashion commodities, one material (cloth-

ing) and the other nonmaterial (inormation, taste, and blogs), relies on

racially gendered Asian bodies seen as particularly suited or ashion laborand the specic needs o global Western ashion capitalism. The industrial

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16

manuacture o mass-produced and mass-distributed clothing requires

cheap, docile, and plentiul labor that Asian and immigrant Asian women

and girls are imagined to embody and to be naturally suited to provide.

Today, English-speaking Asian superbloggers are also well positioned to

provide important contributions to Western ashion’s expansion into and

capture o emerging and dynamic Asian markets. As I suggested above, the

bloggers are racially matched with the Asian consumers whom Western

ashion companies have set their sights on. At the same time, because the

bloggers are English speakers, they are amiliarly and knowably Western.

They are just racially exotic enough to have a wide market appeal—to Asian

as well as to non-Asian English-speaking consumers and retailers— yet not

so oreign that their racial difference disrupts the postracial antasy o

late capitalism. Asian superbloggers’ language privilege lends economic

value to their racially marked bodies. Their English uency maintains their

highly marketable balance between exotic and amiliar.

Finally and just as importantly, Asian superbloggers possess a sizable

personal market share o the so-called attention economy as well as the ca-

pacity to accumulate more currency because they have a strong online

presence, a highly engaged and loyal audience base, and a proven and

signicant record or promoting Western ashion brands (again, ofenor ree). With the institutionalization o social commerce in which social

media technologies and practices play key roles in shaping consumer be-

haviors and decisions, the Western ashion industry is increasingly (prob-

ably more than it would care to admit) relying on the unwaged labor o

bloggers or its continuation and development.

It is important to underscore that personal style blog labor is always ree

labor— voluntarily given and unpaid. More than an economic issue, this is

an issue o identity. Superbloggers’ construction o their labor subjectivi-ties as artists rests on the idea that they blog or passion, not or money. In

a New York Times article about her, Lau describes her blogging in terms o an

obsession that has “no nancial motivation.” Similarly, while blogging

provides Song opportunities or additional capital streams, she requently

points out that her main source o income is her interior design job. This

job serves as Song’s proo that her blog is a “genuine expression o her

style.”

Superbloggers—an innitesimally tiny raction o all bloggers—havemanaged to create a livelihood rom side jobs such as brand collabora-


26/48

tions, affi liate links, direct ad sales, and reelancing that can be quite lu-

crative. Top-tier bloggers make as much as $, annually (possibly

more, depending on the number and types o design collaborations, paid

appearances, and advertising partnerships they amass). But these are indi-

rect earning methods that are separate rom, though related to, the actual

production o blogs. The actual blogging labor o superbloggers—like all

bloggers—is unwaged work. In this way, superbloggers are no different

rom other Internet users who provide the ree labor that keeps the Inter-

net running. Now an $ trillion enterprise, the Internet is built and sus-

tained by a massive network o horizontal yet hierarchical users (as Tiziana

Terranova points out) who voluntarily provide labor in the orm o content

creation, inormation sharing, communicating, buying, selling, and so on.

In this era o social commerce, the various and, again, voluntary online

activities o ashion media and market consumers now provide much o

the advertising and promotion that ashion retailers and designers depend

on to sell their clothes. According to a report by the Internet search

engine company Technorati, bloggers are particularly inuential. Thirty-one

percent o ashion consumers say blogs inuence their purchases. A our-

year survey conducted by the media company BlogHer (which ocuses on

women bloggers and blog readers, a signicant number o whom participatein the ashion blogosphere) ound that or the majority o emale readers

( percent), recommendations rom bloggers have more weight than ce-

lebrity endorsements. What this inuence translates to in numbers is stag-

gering. A top-tier blog like Craig and Cook’s BagSnob can drive as much as

$ million in annual sales to retailers. While retailers prot enormously,

even the highest paid bloggers earn negligible ees. As with garment work-

ers, Asian superbloggers’ relationship to the broader ashion industry is

characterized by sharply asymmetrical distributions o labor and earnings.Perhaps the strongest link between Asian personal style superbloggers

and Asian garment workers is the historically raught position they share

as the embodied evidence o and alibi or the racially gendered processes

o transnational ashion capitalism. The two groups o Asian workers en-

tered Western ashion’s production systems in related but distinct histori-

cal moments when economic articulations o Asians represented them as

Western capitalist success stories (as model minority labor) and, paradoxi-

cally, as economic competitors threatening the dominant racial order o Western capitalism (as cheap Asian labor).

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18

Understood within a taste model o race relations, the contradictory

status o Asian workers and o meanings o Asian labor in these two di-

erent ashion production systems is not surprising. Taste is exible and

eeting—none more so than ashion taste. One person’s taste is likely to

be another person’s distaste, but one’s taste can also become one’s distaste

as a result o changing personal and popular tastes. One particular orm

o distaste is the afertaste. These are tastes that might at rst be pleasing

but, afer lingering too long in the mouth, throat, or public sphere (or

example, through media overexposure) become unpalatable.

Historically, we have seen the increased visibility o racial Others in po-

sitions o political power, economic employment, or academic arenas turn

racial admiration into racial resentment. The popular reception o model

minorities provides a useul example o the slide rom racial taste to ra-

cial afertaste. In the s, the U.S. paper o record, the New York Times,

praised “Japanese American style” work ethic and academic achievements.

In , an article published in the same newspaper expressed concerns

that the overrepresentation o Asians at top-ranked universities like the

University o Caliornia at Berkeley were turning these American institu-

tions into “Little Asias.” More than our decades afer embracing the

Asian model minority and with the seeming rise in the number o modelminorities at American institutions, the “Little Asias” article reects the

limits o racial tolerance when racial taste becomes racial afertaste. The

Times article described Asians as “the demographic o the moment,”

suggesting that Asians had overstayed their moment and lef racial traces

that were apparently neither assimilable nor repressible, and certainly not

ully controllable. One such racial trace mentioned in the article is Man-

darin, a language described as now “part o the soundtrack at this iconic

university,” heard “all the time, in plazas, caeterias, classrooms, study halls,dorms and ast-ood outlets.”

Racial afertastes describe aversions to racial alterities, the eatures, as-

pects, and bodies o racial otherness that are not easily consumable either

because their racial avor is perceived as too strong or because their racial

traces linger so long that they exceed the terms and limits o racial palat-

ability. Afertastes mark the limits o racial tolerance; they are not mani-

estations o blatant racial hatred. Afertastes are taste judgments derived

rom perceptions that racial boundaries o social and economic power andprivilege are being threatened by a gure or eature o racial alterity seen


28/48

not just as out o place, but as not keeping its place because it is encroach-

ing on places where it does not belong (like iconic American universities

or job markets that belong to so-called real Americans). Racial afertastes

are the bringing to the surace o racial anxieties and apprehensions that

exceed the limits o racial tolerance. Taste and afertaste, like racial tol-

erance and intolerance, are contradictory yet complementary. Part o the

same structure o racial power and domination, they are systemically co-

operating and co-constituted.

Economic articulations o Asian ashion workers as both solutions or

and problems o the Western ashion industry’s productive needs are also

contradictory and complementary. And i, as Bourdieu argues, taste is re-

ective not so much o personal preerence but o “the logic o the space

o [taste] production,” then an examination o the taste or Asian ashion

workers and its afertaste has important implications or our understand-

ing o the contradictory yet complementary racial logics o transnational

capitalism in the late twentieth century and inormational capitalism in

the early twenty-rst century.

While Asian personal style superbloggers are generally associated with

the new Asian creative class—a labor category that supposedly distin-

guishes them rom previous racialized categories o Asian model minoritylabor like the effi cient and passive garment worker or electronics assembly

worker—the superbloggers can be understood as a model minority labor

orce or the digital era. The model minority thesis emerged in the s

as a racial discourse that constructs an image o Asians in the United States

and elsewhere as hardworking, sel-driven, and sel-suffi cient people who

maximize available opportunities or social and economic advancement

(at school or in the workplace), all without uss or riction. In the civil rights

era, it unctioned as a liberal alibi that countered the growing criticisms ostructural racial inequalities raised most orceully and publicly by Arican

Americans and Latinos. Images o the Asian model minority in tele vision

news, entertainment media, and popular newspapers and magazines like

the New York Times and U.S. News and World Report repeatedly deployed the

Asian model minority stereotype as a way to obscure the racialized reali-

ties o systemically uneven distributions o political, economic, and social

power, opportunities, and resources.

In the s, advocates o neoliberal policies and discourses ramed thetransnationalization o production that shifed Western manuacturing

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20

work offshore and underground as the triumph o ree-market democracy.

The largely Asian and Latina workorce in the United States and abroad

that ll the jobs created by the global expansion o Western apparel man-

uacturing constitute a model minority labor orce. The workers are per-

ceived as ideally suited to ulll the demands o Western ashion capital

or dramatically reduced labor costs, quick turnaround o a high volume

o garments, and maximized prots. Richard Pierce is the ormer owner

o a garment actory in Saipan, a U.S. territory in the South Pacic that

in the s and s produced clothes or U.S. brands like Gap, Nord-

strom, Liz Claiborne, JC Penney, Abercrombie and Fitch, Polo, Gymboree,

and Sears, to name a ew. Pierce boasts o the predominantly Chinese and

Filipina labor orce his actory had: “I remember one o the biggest manu-

acturers here when he visited our company. . . . He came into the actory

and the rst thing he did was, he kind o just listened and you can tell by

the hum o the machinery there whether it’s a productive place. He just

got this smile on his ace because our workers were actually, I think, better

than his. It’s a busy place.”

While Asian and Latina garment workers have been vocal about the bru-

tal working conditions and criminal labor practices necessary to sustain

the high level o productivity that labor contractors, designers, retailers,and consumers have come to expect, they are regularly held up as living

proo that the promise o ree-market democracy (in which a ree, competi-

tive market will positively inuence individual and national economic and

social development) has been realized. Pierce maintains that the apparel

manuacturing industry’s system o contract, contingent, and outsourced

labor is “to the benet o here [Saipan’s economy] and particularly, I think

more than anything, to the benet o the ladies that are here in our busi-

ness that come rom other places.” Pierce’s perspective is a commonneoliberal stance that ails to acknowledge the ways neoliberal economic

policies are directly responsible or widening the gap between the rich and

the poor in the United States as well as deepening the international divi-

sion o labor between the Global North and the Global South (and all o

that division’s racialized and gendered relations o production). A

lawsuit led by more than , garment workers in Saipan (the majority

o whom were rom China and the Philippines) clearly contradicts Pierce’s

claim. The lawsuit cited labor and human rights violations—includingemotional abuse, dangerous working conditions, nonpayment, and debt


30/48

peonage—that essentially held workers hostage in garment actories,

keeping them rom their children and other amily members.

Uncritical celebrations about the benets o neoliberal restructur-

ing or (Asian) workers in other countries occurred at the same time that

(white) workers in the United States in the s were experiencing severe

economic decline as a consequence o “the combined effects o deindus-

trialization, economic restructuring, and the oppressive materialism o a

market society where things have more value than people.” The model

minority worker discourse added more uel to the ames o anti-Asian

sentiment, which has a long history in the United States. In the s

and s, a pervasive belie that Asians represented a oreign economic

enemy to white American workers led to heightened anti-Asian violence,

including the murder o Vincent Chin in Detroit, Michigan. (One o his

attackers was heard saying, “It’s because o you little motheruckers that

we’re out o work!”) Asian garment workers in the s and s were

put in the contradictory position o embodying both a gendered model mi-

nority labor orce and a racialized and oreign economic enemy.

The raught position o Asian garment workers—as the racially gen-

dered embodiment o the problem o and the solution or transnational

ashion capitalism, as the alibi conrming and the evidence undermin-ing the promise o ree-market democracy, and as the model minority

labor orce and oreign economic competition—mirrors that o the new

Asian ashion worker. Asian superbloggers such as Yambao, Lau, Song,

and Neely are regularly held up as proo that the digital democratization

o ashion production systems is real. The indirect earnings o Yambao,

Song, and Lau are routinely the ocus o news stories about ashion’s digi-

tal democratization. To be sure, they provide compelling evidence or

claims that social media are lowering participation barriers and allowingmore people to enter the previously insular ashion industry. The act that

ordinary Asian Internet users have become superbloggers (earning six g-

ures annually) in a historically white cultural economic eld—seemingly

through their own hard work and determination—is the kind o rags-to-

riches trajectory that is essential to the model minority discourse. Asian

superbloggers are not simply among the top earning personal style blog-

gers; in , Yambao and Song were the two highest grossing superblog-

gers in the world. Yambao made headlines when he admitted in the earlydays o personal style blogging that “he makes more than $, per

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22

year,” mostly rom advertising and guest appearances. Aimee Song, the

highest-paid blogger in the world, commanded ees as high as $, or

a single brand collaboration a couple o years ago. While there are no

published data, her current ees are likely higher now since her popularity

has increased in recent years.

But as with the earlier ormation o the model minority ashion worker,

the Asian superblogger is largely a discursive construction that conceals

deep-seated asymmetries o race, color, class, and body size in the blogo-

sphere and in the global ashion industry more broadly. Asian superblog-

gers are a highly visible and high-achieving group, but they are also only

a tiny minority o superbloggers— which is why the same ew Asian super-

bloggers are named over and over in the ashion media. The personal

style superblogosphere, as a whole, is overwhelmingly white. At the same

time, Asian superbloggers’ body sizes and skin tones complement rather

than challenge dominant standards o beauty. In act, personal style blogs

and other related social media platorms and practices have not so much

democratized the ashion industry as they have enabled limited orms o

diversication that do not upset the racialized hierarchies o ashion bodies,

tastes, and economies that have historically structured the Western ash-

ion industry.Discursive constructions o Asian superbloggers as the embodied evi-

dence o digital democratization also ignore the uneven social relations

built into the commercial Internet, where a handul o corporations control

the technical means o communication, creative expression, and sociabil-

ity that millions use but will never own. While new user-driven technolo-

gies o communication and inormation have certainly lowered participation

barriers in ashion’s productive and consumer economies, they have not

eliminated disparities in the quality o participation in and through theblogosphere. Henry Jenkins, Craig Watkins, and others have argued that

the corporatization and mass distribution o cheaper Internet technolo-

gies and telecommunications inrastructure have narrowed the digital

divide between the technological haves and have-nots. These authors cau-

tion, however, that there is a growing participation gap in which certain

online users and activities that serve and sustain corporate interests are

privileged over others. The participation gap is unmistakable in the per-

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Creating a ashion blog is ree and relatively easy, thanks to new on-

line publishing ser vices. Yet the corporate-run search engines’ operating

logic means that only the most popular sites are likely to show up in web

searches. The advent o expensive search engine optimization ser vices

means that the top search result positions are or sale to sites with large

bankrolls. The same websites and blogs routinely appear in the top three to

ve results o web searches; all other sites, as Jodi Dean puts it, are “drowned

in the massive ow [o commercialized data].” When I ran a search using

the term fashion blog, the rst page o Google results included only corpo-

rate and monetized blogs maintained by Elle magazine, New York magazine,

the Sartorialist, and Fashion Toast (Neely’s blog, which is now hosted, but

not owned, by the media giant Fairchild Fashion Media). I received nearly

identical results using the Bing and Yahoo search engines. Blogs owned

and run by individual personal style bloggers were nowhere near the top

o the search rankings. This conrms Dean’s observations that digital de-

mocracy is little more than a “neoliberal antasy”: “Rather than a rhizom-

atic structure where any one point is as likely to be reached as any other,

what we have on the web are situations o massive inequality, massive di-

erentials o scales where some nodes get tons o hits and the vast majority

get almost none.”

In the personal style blogosphere, ashion’s traditional social hierar-

chies are not leveling out, nor are they becoming more democratic. In-

stead, these hierarchies have evolved in ways that allow them to expand

into this popular digital arena. Far rom being a postracial meritocracy,

the personal style blogosphere is organized by highly uneven distributions

o power and privilege that are not determined by blog quality. The on-

line traffi c o some Arican American ashion blogs (both personal style

blogs and street style blogs) outrank or are comparable to white and AsianEnglish-language U.S. ashion blogs, yet many o the Arican American

blogs with the most traffi c, like The Fashion Bomb, do not show up in top

search results and do not receive nearly the same levels o national and

global attention as do white and English-language Asian superblogs. With

the notable exceptions o Street Etiquette, a style blog coproduced by

Joshua Kissi and Travis Gumbs; Tamu McPherson’s street style blog All

the Pretty Birds; and Kathryn Finney’s cheap chic blog, The Budget Fash-

ionista, Arican American–run blogs occupy the same marginal status in

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the blogosphere as Arican American ashion models (and Black ashion

models more broadly) do on the runway.

Bloggers that are not located in global media empires also have an

extremely diffi cult time gaining the attention o the hegemonic Western

ashion industry. Han Huohuo, or example, is a blogging sensation in

China. His account on the strictly policed Chinese microblogging platorm

Weibo draws more than a million ollowers, yet he hardly registers in the

mainstream consciousness o the Western ashion public. Because he lives

in China and is subject to its state-run and heavily censored media sys-

tem, Han lacks access to popular blog host sites like Blogger and Word-

Press; blog-measuring sites like Technorati; and social media platorms

like YouTube, Vimeo, and Twitter. Further, Weibo is not readily accessible

to audiences outside o mainland China, although modied versions o it

exist in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Han and other Chinese bloggers are urther disadvantaged by China’s

relatively low ranking on the Global Creativity Index that measures national

levels o nancial investment and research, among other technological in-

rastructural commitments. In , China ranked thirty-seventh, about

on a par with Latvia and Bulgaria. In effect, these technological condi-

tions structure the ows o inormation and communication that shapebloggers’ work experiences, opportunities, and earning potential (in terms

o social, cultural, inormational, and nancial capital). As a result, the social

divisions o labor and the social stratications that exist outside o the Inter-

net are embedded in and supported by the operating logic o search engines

and the development logic o telecommunications networks and ser vices.

Even superbloggers who have the advantages o public, industry, and

technological attention (such as a top rank in search engine results) par-

ticipate in the blogosphere under highly asymmetrical and exploitativeconditions. Superbloggers who generate hundreds o thousands o clicks

on and in their blogs and microblogs (Twitter, Instagram, and so on) may

or may not monetize their popularity, but they do create an extraordinary

amount o capital or social media sites that these companies depend on

or revenue. Popular platorms draw interest and unding rom venture capi-

tal rms as well as major advertisers—both o which are willing to pay

top-ranked Internet companies a lot o money or access to their users’ inor-

mation and attention. The importance o Asian superbloggers to Google


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has not escaped the company’s notice. When the Web behemoth wanted

to understand how new media are consumed and used, it turned to a small

handul o experts, among them Lau, Yambao, Ton, and Ethan Nguyen.

For every superblogger who can command public and corporate atten-

tion, there are thousands more (across all racial groups) who will never

nd a general audience, much less a livelihood. Asian superbloggers have

won the “glittering prizes” in what Andrew Ross calls the “jackpot econ-

omy,” but as with all jackpots, there are many more players than there are

winners. As I demonstrate throughout this book, the glittering prizes o

substantial online traffi c, corporate collaborations, sponsorships, affi lia-

tions, and paid reelance writing and speaking opportunities can distract

us rom noticing that the game is rigged against bloggers, even those who

have achieved considerable success. The dominant ashion industry rigs

the game in a way that recalls Marx’s notion o worker alienation: as Mark

Andrejevic puts it, workers’ labors are turned back on them. Ironically,

the more successul bloggers are, the better positioned they are or in-

creased sel- and corporate exploitation.

Asian superbloggers have acquired a substantial number o privileges

within the ashion industry. Yet these privileges come at a cost. The cor-

porate Internet, as Andrejevic has argued, is structured to accelerate andchannel users’ behaviors or commercial prot. Online publishing ser vices

encourage bloggers to make their sites visible to search engines; use tags

and categories (a classication system that groups similar blog posts

together and makes them searchable); post ofen; respond to readers’

comments; link to other blogs; and even pay or web traffi c using ser vices

like StumbleUpon, which orwards web content to users. These activities

can help increase and sustain high levels o blog traffi c—a key goal or

superbloggers—but they also demand more and more ree labor rom thebloggers in the orm o more blog posts as well as more Tweets, Instagram

photographs, and other social media content. These diverse but converg-

ing social media platorms provide additional channels or online traffi c

to the blog and different possibilities or brand collaborations. In Febru-

ary , or example, Song— whose Instagram account attracts more

than our million weekly hits and has more than a million ollowers—took

over the Instagram account or the online ashion retailer Revolve Cloth-

ing. These are temporary guest worker arrangements that are in addition

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to the personal style blogging that bloggers do or their own social media

channels.

Rather than hiring a ull-time, permanent employee (who earns a

regular salary and benets), retailers, brands, and designers turn to high-

prole superbloggers as short-term contract workers to ll a variety o jobs

including social media managers, models, and spokespeople. Asian super-

bloggers, as I suggested above, have a structural advantage in ashion’s ca-

sual labor markets. Not only does their strong online presence provide the

all-important personal customer touch points that amiliarize consumers

with ashion brands, but their racially marked bodies also link them to the

kinds o consumers that brands are particularly targeting. In other words,

their racial advantage makes them more vulnerable to the exploitative ea-

tures o casual labor.

In the section that ollows, I briey revisit the history o Asian garment

workers. While Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet ocuses on the contem-

porary orms and practices o Asian ashion work seen in personal style

blogging, the history o an earlier mode o Asian ashion work is crucial.

Presenting this history even briey provides an important contextual back-

drop or examining the historical continuities, global orces, and racially

gendered rameworks that structure the taste work o Asian superbloggerstoday.

To be sure, Asian garment workers’ ashion tastes play no role in their

production o ashion products. Asian garment workers’ bodies—the

sites at which taste is perceived, perormed, and socially constructed—are

ragmented and ultimately alienated rom the productive processes o ap-

parel manuacturing. Apparel manuacturing industries exert enormous

amounts o control over and abuse o garment workers’ bodies (even their

bodily unctions are controlled by routine denials o bathroom breaks).The near total devaluation o their bodies reduces hundreds o thousands

o Asian women and child workers to little more than their labor power.

Yet the history o Asian ashion work in apparel manuacturing sectors is

worth reviewing in an investigation o Asian personal style superblogging

or what it can reveal about changing and enduring racialized hierarchies

that structure the political economic and social terrain on which even

some o the most elite levels o Asian ashion work take place.


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A Critical Review of Asian Fashion Labor

Since the s, Asian women and girls have made major contributions to

the global expansion and development o the U.S. ashion industry—now

a dominant cultural, economic, and aesthetic power in global ashion. The

Asian and Asian American history o the U.S. garment industry is a long

and complex story that has been the subject o numerous academic and

popular texts. The Asian ashion worker and the garment industry are criti-

cal topics in and across development studies; globalization studies; urban

studies; eminist labor studies; immigration studies; sociological, political

economic, and cultural studies o ashion; and comparative ethnic studies.

The Asian garment worker holds a central position in the critical imagi-

nary o Asian American studies and disciplines that intersect and overlap

with the eld. When Amerasia conducted an inventory o Asian American

and Asian diaspora studies publications, the journal’s editors ound that

research “related to the labor issues [surrounding] contemporary garment

workers [got] the most attention.” The Asian garment worker also ap-

pears in Asian American studies scholarship that is not specically about

labor and economy. For example, literary, media, and cultural studies texts

like Darrell Hamamoto’s Monitored Peril: Asian Americans and the Politics of TVRepresentation and Laura Hyun Yi Kang’s Compositional Subjects: Enguring

Asian/American Women invoke the Asian garment worker as a gure repre-

senting global capitalism’s transormations. Throughout Asian American

and Asian diaspora studies, the Asian garment worker embodies globaliza-

tion’s cultural, social, and economic effects.

Western academic literature, lms, news reports, and documentaries

about garment workers in general regularly ocus on the Asian emale

ashion worker. In a scholarly essay on digital labor’s political signicance,David Hesmondhalgh pits the eminized Asian actory worker against

(positive) ree digital creative labor: “Are we really meant to see people who

sit at their computers modiying code or typing out responses to shows

as ‘exploited’ in the same way as those who endure appalling conditions

and pay in Indonesian sweatshops?” The gendered racialization o gar-

ment workers in these sites accurately reects contemporary workorce de-

mographics in which Asian women are now a majority (though they have

not always been). Such gendered racialization is also present in assump-tions about Asian women’s natural acility or gendered manual labor—or

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example, stereotypes about their nimble ngers. In reducing Asian women

to their racial and gendered bodies, the ashion industry has made them

both vital and vulnerable to ashion’s material conditions and productive

economy.

Despite their now ubiquitous presence, Asians have not always partic-

ipated in the U.S. garment industry. From to , Asian workers

made up a very small minority o the multiracial and multiethnic apparel

manuacturing workorce. Beginning in , Asian exclusion laws— which

included special bars against Asian women and Asian workers—kept

Asians rom establishing a oothold in this growing industry. Beore the

Immigration and Nationality Act reversed these anti-Asian immigra-

tion policies, the U.S. garment industry was powered rst by Italian and

Eastern European Jewish immigrant labor and, ollowing World War I, by

Arican American and Puerto Rican labor.

During World War II, Italian and Jewish workers and members o other

white ethnic groups lef the industry or better-paying jobs related to the

war effort, and Arican Americans who had lef the South as part o the Sec-

ond Great Migration and Puerto Ricans who were emigrating in increas-

ingly large numbers to New York City lled most o the garment industry

jobs.

Though Arican American and Puerto Rican workers ormed themajority o the workorce, they rarely occupied management positions,

which members o white ethnic groups held until the s. And though

the ashion industry turned to Southeast Asia or cheap labor as early as

the s (when postwar prosperity increased the demand or clothing

and other personal goods), it was not until the late s and early s

that Asian women became a visible presence in the garment industry.

In the mid-s, several key events acilitated Asian women’s entry

into the garment industry: the passage o the Civil Rights Act, affi r-mative action policies, and the Immigration and Nationality Act. En-

couraged by recent civil rights victories, Arican Americans lef the garment

industry or better employment opportunities, creating a labor shortage

that Asians soon alleviated. Chinese, Korean, and Southeast Asian im-

migrants who were just arriving in the United States afer the passage o

the Immigration and Nationality Act took jobs in the garment industry,

primarily in Los Angeles and New York City. According to a Colum-

bia University survey, percent o New York’s Chinatown residents were working in the apparel industry at that time. Chinese actory owners in New


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York’s Lower East Side and Chinatown tended to hire Chinese American

workers. Korean actory owners who opened shops in midtown Manhat-

tan hired mostly Mexican and Ecuadoran workers. The ethnic hiring

networks and work environments o Chinese-owned garment actories

provided Chinese workers with some exibility in their work time. Marga-

ret M. Chin notes that Chinese actory owners offered courtesies to mem-

bers o their ethnic group, such as permitting workers to run errands in

the middle o the workday or bring their children to work on school holi-

days. Chinese workers, however, complained that Chinese actory owners

ofen took advantage o them. They worked more hours at piecework ra

Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet by Minh-Ha T. Pham

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