CHINESE-AMERICAN DESIGNERS: AN EXHIBIT
“Front Row: Chinese-American Designers,” the newly-opened exhibit at New York’s Museum of Chinese in America, illustrates the beautiful idea that a culture of immigrants can go from sweatshop to runway within one generation.
It was as recent as the 1980s that the whir of machines resounded through the avenues and streets of the Garment District, and “sweatshop” was still descriptive of the workplace for thousands of immigrant workers. At the time, about 20,000 Chinese men and women still filled the factories of this area of Manhattan from Sixth to Ninth Avenues and 34th to 42nd Streets, and enforcement of labor standards was far from strict. The show focuses on this decade: But the story is ultimately an optimistic and hopeful one.
We say “optimistic and hopeful” because something else was happening at the time. "In the economic revival of the 1980s, dozens of high-end designers set up headquarters in New York’s Garment District, to take advantage of the city’s media and finance connections," according to The Midtown Gazette. During that time and in that place, for example, Klein and Lauren hit it big.
Simultaneously, certain children of Chinese immigrants had started picking up design sketchbooks rather than toiling at the machines. And among them were Anna Sui, Yeohlee Teng, Vera Wang, and Vivienne Tam—a few of the subjects of the upcoming MOCA exhibit which opened April 26 in the Centre Street galleries of this Chinese culture museum. Videos, designer interviews, photos, and examples of the designers’ work tell the stories of these visionaries.
Visitors are seeing Sui as the rock-and-roll love-child of boho and glam, whose Spring 2013 show offered the world cut-off fishnets, big sunglasses, and layers upon layers of floral prints, leather, and lace to express simultaneous rebellion and joie de vivre.
