Fashion City: Diasporic Connections and Garment Industrial Histories Between the US and Asia

Abstract

This article explores how fashion is key to understanding the material legacies of urban development across East Asia, New York, and Los Angeles. Here, fashion is not just a material object, but a historical set of practices, relations, and migrant narratives. Fashion’s postcolonial legacies and diasporic connections have played a significant role in the development of industrial districts, special economic zones, and knowledge clusters across the Pacific. Likewise, fashion workers and designers continue to shape new urban geographies that stretch across and connect the US and Asia. Drawing upon ethnographic multi-sited fieldwork, and auto-ethnographic reflection, this article examines how the interplay between these industrial histories in garments, markets, labor and design, is shaped by both trans-Pacific and inter-Asian diasporic connections (across New York, LA, Seoul, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai): connections that are vital for understanding the urbanization of contemporary fashion economies across the US and Asia.