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

Introduction

A couple of years ago, I was invited to speak at the Korean Apparel Manufacturing Association meetings in Seoul in my capacity as Director of the Fashion Studies program at Parsons, the design school I teach at in New York. I was asked to speak of the rise of New York as a global fashion capital, and approached the talk naively, without realizing that there were government officials and policy makers in the room. The audience was interested in understanding how fashion was going to change the city of Seoul, bring in foreign investment and cultivate an image of Seoul as a global cultural center and symbol of modernity across Asia and beyond. The large audience asked questions on how the fashion industries in Seoul and New York were going to grow economically in the next 10, 20 years. Local business owners and associations from the local garment district were listening closely, anxious to learn what was at stake and how these changes to the city and manufacturing would affect the fragile ecosystem of design and labor in which they worked, in an area of the city that was fast disappearing.

I approached the talk through the lens of the history of the New York fashion industry. I narrated a key moment in New York in the 1970s that framed the historical, social and cultural changes that occurred within the last 30 years in the garment district – a period when multiple forces intensified the city’s deindustrialization. At the same time the city’s economic, political, and social powers transformed the city from a manufacturing hub to an iconic fashion city. Most people think of New York’s transformation into a global fashion capital as an overnight success. In truth the development of its fashion industry was part of the broader urban development ethos that changed the cultural identity of the metropolis in the following three decades. From the working class to the luxury high-class, from low culture to high culture, from manual labor to design, branding, and marketing, the meta-narrative of a transition ‘from garments to fashion’ has indeed helped promote urban development in contemporary New York and help it to stylize itself as a global city, but it is also a narrative often at the disadvantage of working communities. Furthermore, this shift has also been the result of an inter-twined urban and industrial history linking the US fashion industry and garment and manufacturing centers in Asia from the 1970s onwards. Diasporic communities, in particular, have played an instrumental role in the shaping and development of fashion economies within and between the cities of New York, LA, Seoul, and Guangzhou.

This article asks in what ways has garment manufacturing in Asia shaped the transformation of the US garment industry into the creative fashion economy that it is known for today? It highlights the transformative role that fashion plays in urban development in cities and rural areas across the US and Asia, revealing how developmental forms of urbanization in Asia have been tightly connected to urban histories elsewhere, and in ways that invoke ongoing post-colonial and Cold War legacies. To do so, it highlights two important questions: 1) How has garment industrialization in Asia (in the development of earlier garment industrial districts, and zonal and industrial histories among East Asian tiger economies) informed, influenced, and cultivated the fashion economies in cities such as New York and Los Angeles, which are known as US fashion capitals today? 2) What effect does the continued development of fashion have on the transformations and geography of urban areas in Asia and beyond? In the contemporary moment, cities such as Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Seoul are eager to both promote and upgrade their fashion culture industries and creative economies with the establishment of fashion weeks, fashion schools and programs, design centers, and ‘incubator’ programs. In an era of hyper-mobile capital and heightened inter-urban competition, fashion is transforming the urban landscape and geography of the city. Understanding fashion’s industrial histories – its role in the development of industrial districts and zones, the migration of fashion workers, and cultural intermediaries in the form of (Korean) diaspora – is thus important for grasping its continued legacy in shaping American and Asian cities.

This article is organized as follows: the first section examines the role of fashion in New York’s development as a global city. I then explore the role of garments in shaping urban development in Asia throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The following section then looks at the trans-Pacific and inter-Asian legacies of the fashion city, where diasporic communities became crucial to linking manufacturing in China with American and European investment capital, and consumers in the Global North. I specifically examine fast-fashion in Los Angeles and the familial logics of fashion. Finally, I discuss the refashioning of Asian cities through inter-urban competition in the fashion circuit, a process that has real material and economic consequences for the transformations of the urban landscape. Multi-sited and across cities and histories, I show how the inter-Asian and trans-Pacific migration of fashion workers have a continued legacy in shaping American and Asian cities in an intertwined and unexpected ways.

Fashioning the Global City

New York of the 1980s was the site of seemingly opposing economic forces to those fueling rapid urbanization in East Asia. The city was undergoing deindustrialization, which nearly phased out all of its local manufacturing industries. To stem the flow, city governments across the US began to look towards the development of their creative economies to replace manufacturing. This was also a key moment for New York’s local business, political elites, and Wall Street financiers to capitalize on the reimagining and remaking of a city they thought was inefficiently run by unionized middle-class workers (Moody, 2007). Embracing the tenets of free market individualism, privatization and deregulation of all industries (as espoused by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher of those times), new alliances flourished between real estate development, finance, tourism and fashion, which would put forth agendas that fostered the use of public funds towards private efforts and profit. Powerful local finance and real estate lobbies, including advocacy groups such as The Association for a Better New York (ABNY), emerged from this era, establishing enormous tax breaks for businesses which borrowed public funds originally set aside for housing, job training, and transportation. This money subsidized instead private offices and high-end residential real estate development in Manhattan (Greenberg, 2008).

Central to these lobbies was the idea that the city’s cultural image abroad needed rebranding in order to stimulate business growth, protect financial markets, and increase real estate value in New York. Fashion would become a powerful tool throughout the 1980s and 1990s as a collaborative effort between elites, corporate media and advertising firms to ‘rebrand’ the city for outside business travelers, convention goers, international tourists, and affluent elites. The most famous local New York fashion designers of the 1980s/1990s, including Bill Blass, Geoffrey Beene, Oscar de la Renta, Nicole Miller, Donna Karan, Liz Claiborne, Anne Klein, and Eileen Fisher, joined the local industry leaders and government to transform the city’s identity from a working-class garment center to a global fashion capital that attracted international fashion designers and promoted shopping. They championed Rudolph Giuliani, the 1993 mayoral candidate who campaigned around ‘Made in New York’ and ‘Designed in New York’ campaigns to encourage new partnerships between manufacturing and design (Moon, 2009).

This coalitions would form the Fashion Center Business Improvement District, transform factory spaces into fashion showroom lofts, create high-end retail districts, and make Times Square the headquarters of Conde Nast, the largest publishing firm in global fashion. These activities went hand in hand with the liberalization of international trade laws and local pro-business policies with tax breaks that would permit small time companies to become globally recognizable American design corporations throughout the 1990s. American fashion companies of this era successfully acquired global licensing agreements and precipitated the offshoring of mass-production in clothing to overseas factories in Asia in rapid timing and in enormous scales. With the federal de-regularization of media and communications industries within the US (Telecommunications Act of 1996), new global media systems aired television shows like Sex and the City and Project Runway to global audiences, largely advertising New York fashion and luxury retail to potentially new markets around the world. Fashion billboards soon vertically blanketed the walls of the pedestrian city, adding fashion and glamour to its everyday visual culture.

While New York adopted the producer services, luxury consumption, and festival atmosphere associated with its persona as a global city, low-wage manufacturing in its fashion district continued to exist in part because of the constant influx of immigrants who labored within its factories – particularly those from Korea and China who have owned local New York garment factories from the 1970s onwards (Sassen, 1991). In 1983, there were more than 500 sewing shops with more than 20,000 Chinese workers in New York’s Chinatown, and Koreans owned over 400 garment shops that employed nearly 14,000 Latinos working in the local New York garment district (Chin, 2005). Korean and Chinese factory owners bought their businesses from Jewish American factory owners looking to make their way out of the industry with the expiration of their 100-year-old leases on factory space. In the next decade, Korean and Chinese-owned businesses would transform the local industry into a cottage industry of ‘sample-making’, manufacturing high-end fashion labels in small batches of production, along with making the runway collections for a growing New York Fashion Week.

In tandem, local New York design schools also grew exponentially throughout this time period, providing a new workforce of design labor for growing multinationals on Seventh Avenue, who were offshoring production now to Asia (Aspers and Godart, 2013). Student populations at The Fashion Institute of Technology, Parsons, The New School for Design, and Pratt Institute were fast internationalizing throughout the late 1990s into the 2000s with newspaper reporters calling it the ‘Asian Invasion’ of the New York fashion industry. Often, two different groups were conflated into one – Asian Americans who were the children of local New York Chinese and Korean factory owners, sewers, or even dry cleaners who had grown up in and around the garment districts in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and fashion design students from Asia, in particular Korea, whose migrations were influenced by the 1997 IMF crisis (or Asian financial crisis) and the call towards globalization by the Korean government. This decade was marked by the movement of young female students driven by the desire to learn English in New York, obtain the prestige of a foreign American degree, gain work experience in famous American fashion companies, and take advantage of powerful alumni connections upon their return to Asia to start their own fashion labels. By 2000, 40 percent of Parsons was comprised of students from Asia, the vast majority of them from Korea, on a campus that began to create global affiliations with design schools in Korea and eventually China (Wang, 2013). New York could not have become the global fashion capital it is known for today without the proliferation of a new technical design workforce of Korean women who had received their training in Korea, alongside Korean and Chinese-owned sample-making factories that would create the runway collections for New York Fashion Week, and in conjunction with the offshoring of and proliferation of garment production facilities in Korea and China and further afield in South and Southeast Asia. In fact, Korean contractors in manufacturing are major intermediaries for American and European fashion companies, and producing in South America, Southeast Asia, and South Asia.

Fashioning Labor, Fashioning Space

It is difficult to disentangle New York’s rise as one of fashion’s global cities without understanding the role of garments in shaping urban development in Asia throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Much of this production took place in newly made Export Processing Zones, a spatial form promoted by the World Bank and United Nations, among other actors. EPZs in Asia were thought to be a way for developing countries to enter into the global marketplace and attract foreign investment, culling foreign investment with highly attractive incentives, from tax holidays to cheap labor. Revolving around garment industries, EPZ construction occurred where industrial land was cheap – all that was required to build a garment factory was its four walls, the purchase of sewing machines, and a constant pool of cheap labor. Garment factories would be established in places where they could easily be relocated to attract new labor, relying heavily on a workforce of transient young women working for incredibly low wages in tedious and exhausting work. This very formula and path towards industrialization, a form of governance that attracts firms and foreign investors who have little interest in assisting host economies in the long term, relied on the labor of migrant female workforces as the central form and site for experimental forms of labor exploitation throughout the 1970s (Yuan and Eden, 1992: 1026–45).

In 1965, post-war South Korea established six export-oriented industrial complexes in Seoul and neighboring Incheon, and in 1971 an EPZ was established at Masan. In Taiwan, Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone was established in 1965. The development of these EPZs in Korea and Taiwan was highly influenced by the success of free trade policies in Hong Kong and Singapore, and were primarily invested in by Japanese and American capital alongside Korean/Taiwanese partnerships (Warr, 1984). The sites and locations were chosen for their proximity to cities, harbors, and Japanese ports, and aimed to connect labor, goods, and highways to foreign buyers. Under government funded export-promotion drives, Korean garment firms including the largest and leading knitwear exporters of the time (such as Hankuk Wool Textile Co., Masan Wool Textile Co., Samsung Moolsan, Miwon Industrial Co., and Samdo Trading company) aimed to dominate the US market in the making of knits and sweaters (Kim, 1965). In fact, Macy’s and May Department Stores headquartered in New York City and carrying American namesake design brands, considered the largest clothing retailers in the US of that time, created new partnerships with Seoul knitting mills and plants throughout the 1970s. Using Korea’s low-cost female labor and Japanese marketing networks, South Korean garment firms produced clothing for American companies such as Nike and Reebok, which saw their corporate dominance in American sportswear rise all throughout the 1980s. In sum, this era saw the development of all kinds of duty-free experimentations and arrangements involving American, Japanese, or foreign firms providing orders and raw materials for Koreans to process and send to American importers. By 1982, there existed 83 firms at Masan EPZ, where the average female worker between the ages of 17 and 25 was making 100,000 won a month (US $146) (Warr, 1984). The development of these EPZs (at both Masan and Kaosuhiang) catalyzed the industrialization, urbanization, and advancement of surrounding regions through the creation of garment industries. In Korea, nearly an entire generation of women cut their teeth, during the country’s industrialization, working in garment factories.

Masan and Kaosuhiang would eventually become templates for SEZs throughout China in the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping’s 1982 reforms of ‘one country, two systems’ which would justify foreign investment and international trade as complementary to China’s history of ‘self-reliance and socialism’ (Lee, 1998). Using ‘a system of coexistence between capitalist and communist modes of production’, the Open Door economic policies focused on developing areas of South China, which were given considerable degrees of autonomy and flexibility in soliciting foreign investment and trade, and included the first five Special Economic Zones (SEZs) of the 1980s in China – Shenzhen, Xiamen, Shangtou, Zhuhai, and the entire province of Hainan (Easterling, 2014). The success of these planned experiments with market economies would go on to create 16 more zones by 1984. And though industries were developed in electronics, hardware and furniture, foreign capital aimed to invest and develop labor-intensive export manufacturing industries that would include clothing and textiles.

As Ching Kwan Lee states, the economic reforms and the development of garment factories and industrial zones of South China was intentional and of no coincidence (Lee, 1998). The de-collectivization of communes and the breakdown of the socialist work unit had released a massive supply of surplus rural labor, and the migration of entire populations into urban areas occurred alongside the influx of foreign capital. Guangdong, in particular, had attained special national status within China, as it had historical ties with overseas Chinese communities and with Hong Kong, and its geographic distance from Beijing reduced the risk of political unrest and disruption to the central government. In these ways, the region had become an appealing site for foreign currency and national bids for foreign investment. As stated in her ethnography:

Guangdong was to be an airlock through which China dealt with the outside world. Shenzhen would be Guangdong’s airlock to Hong Kong, and Hong Kong the direct window to the outside world. The example of Hong Kong’s success was to attract Taiwan. (Lee, 1998: 41, citing Overholt, 1993: 122)

There were further, particular circumstances that made China an attractive destination for foreign fashion companies and surplus capital investment throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The available workforce was educated, healthy because the state provided healthcare, and had a capacity for self-management. ‘Society had been shaped by the hierarchical and disciplined forms of social control, as well as the welfare advances established by the Communist Party of China (CPC) between 1949–1970s’ (Brooks, 2015). Unlike Africa and South America, Chinese workers had come up through a system that guaranteed employment, food supplies, school enrollment, basic health care, family planning, with outstanding life expectancy. Many of these migrant workers were structurally bounded by the state hukou system, a housing registry that tied one to the origin of birth. Called ‘mingong’, once these peasant workers migrated from rural areas into the city, they were deprived of access to education, medical care, or other forms of social welfare available to urban hukou families (Ngai, 2005). Foreign and local ventures heavily capitalized on the non-citizen status of workers, building dormitories in industrial zones to maximize work time, without concern for the reproduction of labor power. It must be understood that these forms of labor exploitation were therefore institutionally legitimated by the Chinese state, using the hukou system to provide labor control for global and private capital.

Industrial areas and zones attracted migrant women in their mid to late 20s who had come to urban areas to make wages for their families, with dreams of a cosmopolitan life in the city, and who were looking to delay the high cost of marriage. For most village girls, short-term wage work was expected during pre-marital life whereby women between the ages of 18 and 25 were incorporated under the ‘expropriation of global capitalism and the state socialist system’ which favored urban and industrial development (Ngai, 2005). In her ethnography Made in China, Pun Ngai shows how young women migrant workers were often faced with the choice between single life as a worker in the city, or married life within her husband’s village. Central to this system of capitalist production and consumption was the use of sexual discourse and gender ideologies, which formed the basis for systematic hierarchies within the workplace (Ngai, 2005). Rural female migrants workers were recruited specifically because they were perceive to be cheaper and easier to regulate or control. As an example, Ngai cites foreign-owned electronic compounds in China, which were ‘metaphorically depicted as peach orchards, where female adolescents wait for men to pursue them’ (Ngai, 2005: 15). She concludes that the ‘bio-power’ of the production machine has only interest in the ‘feminine body’, which is imagined as ‘more obedient, tolerant and conforming to the factory machine’ (Ngai, 2005: 15). Though the state played a dominant role establishing the industry throughout the 1980s, it allowed private firms to gradually take over. With the exodus of Hong Kong manufacturers to Guangdong and Shenzhen, the Pearl River Delta grew in direct competition with Korea and Taiwan’s EPZs, because of the low cost of South China’s industrial lands and the continuous availability of a massive population of female workers.

The Trans-Pacific and Inter-Asian Legacies of the Fashion City

Diasporic communities became crucial to linking manufacturing in China with American and Europe investment capital, and consumers in the Global North. In cities like Hong Kong and Shenzhen, kin networks facilitated business for Hong Kong entrepreneurs who built garment factories in Shenzhen, where relatives were located. These ‘blood related’ joint ventures were written as agreements based on mutual trust and without formal contracts, and called upon to deal with government regulations and labor disputes more ‘flexibly’, alongside benefiting from special treatment and privileges (Brooks, 2015). Ethnic urban villages comprised of kinship networks influenced local power structures, and the former elites or cadres became managers from the same kin lines within local government and the factory system. The village corporations they ran benefited enormously from accommodating migrants – the rural peasants who had lived in these areas suddenly found themselves to be rich landlords. Municipal governments planned infrastructure for industrial cities that would include roads, communication, water, electricity, sewage system, and green space. But as township and village enterprises built on collectively owned rural land along major highways, mixing commercial with residential use, these particular factories often lacked infrastructure, discharging industrial waste directly into rivers.

Factories were continuously built along these kin networks and lines all throughout the Pearl River Delta and eastern seaboard of China in the 1980s and 1990s. Further, Taiwanese and Korean companies switched production to China in the late 1980s, attracted to the lower costs of labor, energy, and transport. This system would lead to the development of textile and clothing industries in the coastal regions of Fujian, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shangdon and Shanghai provinces. Throughout the 1980s and at its height, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and South China collectively shared world clothing and textile production. Between 1980–1994, China’s exports of clothing and textiles increased eightfold in less than two decades. EPZs continued to flourish in also Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Philippines by 1990 (Easterling, 2012). Today, Korean and Chinese contractors have spread their production networks and connected them to lead firms in global value chains across Southeast Asia and South Asia, but have also moved up the global value chain in the form of sending their kids to design schools in the US and Europe, moving between cities and making new connections while also shaping North American cities.

Fashion clusters thus sit within a constantly shifting network of industrial histories, production networks and diasporic connections that integrate cities across Asia but also across the Pacific. This networked, mobile geography of connections thus shapes not only the districts, zones, and enclaves of garment manufacturing but also the form and industries of America’s fashion cities. As discussed above, Korean and Chinese diasporic cultural intermediaries played a significant role in transforming New York into a global fashion capital throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Recently, these industrialized legacies of garment industrialization in Asia are now powerfully shaping the city of Los Angeles, which has become a new center for fast-fashion in the US and global fashion economy. Since 2013, my ethnographic fieldwork has traced the emergence of ‘fast-fashion’ in LA and, in particular, the work of hundreds of Korean families who have, over the last decade, transformed the former LA garment district into the central hub for fast-fashion in the Americas (Moon, 2014). These Korean families – their migration, their knowledge, skills, and experience in garments, and their diasporic networks to manufacturing bases and wholesale clothing markets throughout Asia – are the culmination of these former industrializing histories in Asia and also a reflection of the continued ongoing industrializing histories being made today in Asia. They have subverted the buying structures of American retail, dramatically changed the material object of fashion, and established the growing fashion economy of Los Angeles. Their work in fashion has created new global routes in the making, marketing, distribution, communication, consumption, and pattern of disposal of this one commodity. Their work and livelihoods are the legacy of these earlier industrial garment and zonal histories that occurred in Korea of the 1970s as well as the creation of new zones of garment production throughout China and Southeast Asia today.

‘Fast-fashion’ has only emerged within the US over the last decade but has transformed the global fashion industry in profound ways. Considered cheap and highly trendy clothing, its once stable three-month production cycle – the time it takes to design, manufacture, and distribute clothing to stores, in an extraordinary globe-spanning process – is now collapsed to just two weeks. As a material form, fast-fashion has transformed how clothing is made, what it is made of, how it is assembled, shipped, distributed, sold, and even the way consumers wear and buy it. Fast-fashion is highly desirable because it puts trendy designs and details from high-fashion or the runway into production, making design and fashion accessible to the masses at incredibly affordable prices. As a material form, fast-fashion has powerfully transformed communities, technologies, economies, and the rural and urban landscape across the US and Asia. It also only exists because of these Asian American immigrants within the US, their ties to both American retail and wholesale markets and manufacturing factories in Korea and China, and their histories and experiences in and around the EPZs and garment industrial districts of Asia.

In a neighborhood locally known as the ‘Jobber Market’ in downtown Los Angeles, Korean families make their living by designing clothes, organizing the factory labor that will cut and sew them in countries like China and Vietnam, and selling them wholesale to many of the largest fast-fashion retailers in the US – including Forever 21, Urban Outfitters, T.J. Maxx, Anthropologie, and Nordstrom. These families operate their showrooms in a sprawling, 30-square-block area where over 6000 Korean-owned clothing labels are located. Some are multimillion-dollar enterprises, but the majority are mom-and-pop businesses. Korean husband-and-wife teams run these businesses alongside their designing children, while Mexican husband-and-wife teams serve as sales agents, inventory workers, and packers. Together, these small time producers design, manufacture, and wholesale their garments, supplying cheap and trendy designs for the most prominent clothing markets in across the Americas.

Older generations, having gained three decades of knowledge, experience, and skills in the making of garments (from patternmaking, fit, and quality control, etc.) across three continents from Asia, South America to the US, set up shop in the LA garment district throughout the 1980s and 1990s (see Buechler, 2004, for Koreans in Brazil). Their diasporic connections to other Koreans working abroad in the trade, whether in Korea, China, or Vietnam, connected them to fabric and trim sources, factories, managers, sample-makers, and sewers throughout Asia. Their children, having grown up in the family business, with degrees in design, business, marketing, and merchandising from American universities (including my employer Parsons School of Design in New York), with knowledge of design brands and trends along with American cultural identities, had come of age within the last decade, and were returning to Los Angeles to revamp their parents’ failing garment businesses. Yet these families work within an environment that is increasingly precarious, as they represent new distributions of risk within the local LA industry, with much of it falling on the shoulders of the Korean and Mexican families in LA, and those near the bottom of the production chain in Asia. Working in a highly volatile market where consumer demands are unpredictable and finicky, these fast-fashion manufacturers live at the mercy of powerful corporate retailers – families must invest cash and put thousands of styles (anywhere between six and 40 within a day) into production before knowing what will sell. In most cases, the family unit becomes both the site of intense trust (and perhaps exploitation) in order to survive such fast-fashion’s ephemeral markets.

There’s an uncanny resemblance in the LA Jobber Market to ‘Dongdaemun Market’, the famous wholesale clothing market-turned-retail market in Seoul, which all the Korean vendors in LA cite or have some history or association with. Dongdaemun was born out of the export-centered economic development of Korea during the 1960s and 1970s and was at the frontline of conflict between Korea’s democratic labor movement and the authoritarian state. Since the 1997 Asian IMF crisis, it has become a revitalized retail cluster in Seoul, attracting tourists from China in search of cheap plastic surgery and trendy clothes. Yet its history is born out of a time when Korea was a still impoverished country with high unemployment and an oppressive military regime. Throughout the 1970s, many from this market community emigrated to the US and South America – in particular to Brazil and Argentina – and without language skills or money, the majority ended up leveraging their ties back home to the textile trade. Today, there exists a diaspora of Korean-owned garment factories across Central and South America, East and Southeast Asia, and Korean immigrants have gone on to play large roles in the most important clothing markets across São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Guangzhou, LA and New York. ¹

Though Koreans have worked in the LA garment district since the 1970s, buying up the garment sewing factories that were once owned by the Jewish and Persian communities, it wasn’t until the 1990s that so many Korean-owned fashion manufacturers emerged and thus made up the Jobber Market that exists today. Some say that the 1992 Rodney King race riots were a turning point – with local Korean businesses burned down in Koreatown, with new racialized fears and a weakened local economy, Koreans living in downtown LA were looking for a way out of the industry. Occurring alongside a heightening peso crisis in South America, Koreans from São Paulo were looking to come to LA for better opportunities and better educations for their children. They wanted to escape the growing violence in their own cities and were in search of a more stable dollar.

Familial Logics of Fashion

The Kim family, whom I’ve been meeting regularly in my study of US fast-fashion, is a typical ‘fast-fashion family’ in that they first started their clothing business in São Paulo in the 1970s and 1980s, only to immigrate to LA in 1993. For a good while, they enjoyed a successful business selling garments, but by the 2000s Magdalena, the mother, had noticed a lot of changes happening to the local industry, when sewing began being offshored to China. Clothing that was organized by style and function (pants, sweaters) on department store floors, was now organized by brand names. Gone were the days when a garment shop just took orders from companies like Gap to create basic designs that would continue to sell for several seasons. Big retailers were doing a lot less of their own designing, requiring more complicated details and features in trim and ornamentation from their suppliers. This is when her daughter Daniela and Daniela’s husband Sung Joo decided to join the family business in 2005. Sung Joo, with his degree in Graphic Design from Parsons, would give their little ‘mom and pop’ operation a branded identity – re-designing the interior of their showroom, coming up with a company logo, and creating a sleek looking vendor’s booth at the clothing trade shows. Back and forth to China from LA twice a month, he is being groomed to oversee production. Daniela, with her Fine Arts degree and love for fashion, would become heavily involved in the design process – keeping up-to-date on the latest trends, putting together lookbooks, producing photoshoots that visually narrate the clothes styled on Caucasian models, uploading images and publicizing her clothes on Instagram. Her multiple cultural identities – Korean, Brazilian and American – give her the ability to speak Spanish with her Mexican employees, Korean to factory managers in China, Portuguese with her parents and other 1.5 generationers in the neighborhood, and perfect English with her American buyers and retailers (1.5 refers to those who had moved to the United States at a young age). Magdalena tells me that it’s Daniela who has brought their fashions to the attention of the most prestigious American retail chains and department stores for the very first time and that their American Dream isn’t just about getting into some Ivy League university, but rather to have their clothes sold at the largest of American retailers like Nordstrom or Macy’s.

For their part, Magdalena and her husband Fernando, a patternmaker and a fabric cutter, had gained decades of knowledge and experience in garment construction – they are responsible for smoothly translating Daniela’s design ideas into actual material forms. Magdalena and Fernando have also created relationships to cut and sew in factories across China and now Vietnam, and among the Korean garment community within the US who have shifted clothing production from South and Central America to Asia post 9/11 and recent changes in trade laws. Magdalena tells me of Korean-Chinese agents and traders who run their businesses around fast-fashion – they provide a full package of services all ready for her when she shows up at Guangzhou Airport. She gets picked up by a Korean-speaking driver, stays in a Korean-run hotel that serves her planned Korean meals, while being taken to different factory sources with young bilingual speaking intermediaries. Sung Joo’s close friend from his military service days in Korea, fluent in Korean and Mandarin, now serves as their quality control production manager at the factory in Guangzhou and permanently lives in China. And Sung-Joo himself makes the trip from LA to China, twice a month, to help oversee quality control and garment production.

The Kim family, among many other families in the LA jobber market, suggests that the fashion industry doesn’t operate or occur on a single city or production site. Rather, its skill formations necessitate multi-sitedness – sites which are powerfully negotiated by families through backward and forward linkages. The Kim family’s skills had been acquired in home countries but have also been invested in elsewhere, in terms of skill upgrading. How these fast-fashion families negotiate geography is much different than how we might conventionally think about clusters as isolated or territorially confined. Rather, these fashion economic ‘clusters’ involve a complex history that stretches across spaces and are negotiated by family and migrant networks. These intermediaries help link up these different geographies and also point to the need for multi-sited ethnography for the understanding of this global fashion system.

Refashioning Asian Cities

While just a few zones and industrial districts revolving around garment production existed in Asia in the 1960s, today these designated zones and industrial districts are increasing and offer, instead of factories, fantasies of luxury and fashion to attract foreign investment as destinations for shopping and entertainment. Garment factories are now built alongside green parks, dormitories, theme parks, resorts, corporate enclaves, and luxury shopping malls, reflecting the desire of garment cities to ‘upgrade’ their labor-intensive garment industries, just as New York once had. Municipal governments of cities like Shenzhen have now identified high tech industries as new focuses for jumpstarting the economy, developing new sectors in textiles that produce high quality cloth and synthetic fibers (for example, special functioning coated cloth and non-woven agricultural fabrics). In Shenzhen, as in many other Asian cities looking to ‘upgrade’ from garment manufacturing, the municipal government has set up and established organizations such as the Shenzhen Garment Design Center, to offer training in software development to promote high-tech skills in fashion design. For instance, while more labor-intensive sections of the industry in Korea and China have now migrated inland to Guangdong Province, local workers in the Shenzhen EPZ have become skilled technicians in CAD/CAM techniques. This path of skilling and deskilling is now occurring across the industrializing and deindustrializing garment cities across Asia. Just as it did in New York and Seoul throughout the 1990s and 2000s, in China from 1978 to 2008, culture industries based on fashion, advertising and graphic design, film and television, art and design industries have proliferated and flourished (Chumley, 2016). In Korea but particularly in China, these culture industries have been cultivated by state interventions in the form of investment and the development of industrial districts.

Back in Seoul, speaking to this audience on the rise of New York as a fashion capital, I got the chance to revisit and walk the city 10 years after my first visit. In 2005, I spent much of my time in and around the Dongdaemun neighborhood, the old garment district of Seoul. So much of it had changed – the small time vendors that set up on the sidewalk or in the corridors of underground subway stations, selling supplies, notions, trims, muslin, and blankets, had nearly all disappeared. The hustle and bustle of motorbikes carrying fabric in and out of garment-related buildings were replaced with students and young fashion designers toting around their school design projects and portfolios. Department stores and retail spaces such as Doota and Migliore, which once attracted young Japanese female consumers and tourists in search of cheap fashions, were now replaced with hipper and catchier retail shops and department stores, attracting instead young Chinese female shoppers of a new middle class in search of trendy fashions and plastic surgery in clinics on the top floors of these same department stores.

Parts of the adjacent Changshindong neighborhood, which once housed a garment workers’ rehabilitation center and featured a brass plaque commemorating the death of Chun Tae Il, a garment activist from the 1970s, was replaced with a large Design Center education facility. The Chongyecheon Stream, which snaked alongside the old Pyeongwha garment factories buried under a covered highway, was now restored as part of a completed urban redevelopment and city beautification project. Like New York’s High Line, the neighborhood was ‘cleaned up’ and made attractive for tourists. Perhaps the most noticeable change to the neighborhood was the construction of a giant, silver, saucer-like Design Plaza, built by the architect Zaha Hadid. The building looked like it had swooped in from outer space, demolishing the former Olympic soccer stadium it replaced and which was once filled with flea market hawkers, vendors, and antique dealers. In ways, the new building and plaza represents a more contemporary symbolic embodiment of Korea’s modernity. It seems all across Korea and China, former manufacturing spaces, built during the former industrial district and zonal periods of the 1970s, were now repurposed for the biennales, theme parks, shopping malls, and luxury spaces of fashion consumption, that now mark these deindustrialized cities of Asia. Fashion and design proclaims the purchasing power of Asia.

It is no surprise, then, that ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’ have become the hallmarks of government throughout Korea and China since the mid-2000s as a way to attract investment, develop infrastructure and real estate, as well as gain international prestige. In both Korea and China, ‘creativity’ is the idea to attract talent that could develop ‘soft power’ industries. Just as in New York’s deindustrialization of the 1990s, governments in China and Korea are now focusing on tax revenues and real estate development as the means to stimulate urban growth despite state interventions in limiting political expression (Schwak, 2016). First with town and village enterprises in the early 1980s, then to the building of economic and science technology parks throughout the 1990s, and the development of media conglomerates in the 2000s, Asian cities are rebranding themselves ‘from the world’s factory’ to ‘the world’s tech lab or design studio’. Throughout the 1990s, the focus in South China had always been on the development of industrial clusters and parks involving low-cost manufacturing in the production of socks, clocks, toys, ties, shoes, belts, household appliances. These industries, as Mike Keane points out, were ‘locally born, locally rooted and locally embedded’ and formed the global supply chains for incredibly complex markets (Keane, 2013).

Economic and technology zones (ETZs) with high-tech or innovation parks first appeared in southern coastal areas of China from 1988 onwards, also in an effort to attract foreign investment through diasporic networks (Keane, 2013). The emergence of creative industries throughout the 1990s reflect the ambitions of policymakers, reformers, local government officials, think tanks, and cultural scholars, and driven to reality by ‘land grabs’ and real estate developers. The results are the proliferation of creative clusters and zones throughout China include Beijing’s Songzhuang Capital Arts District and the 798 Art Zone, the Dafen Art Village in Shenzhen, and the ‘creative’ province of Hangzhou – all commercial ventures supported by local governments as state administered contemporary art-communes and cultural districts meant to drive ‘creativity’. Despite all the government rhetoric in cities such as Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Seoul, to nationally promote its fashion culture industries and creative economies, the creation of new cultural zones and districts dedicated to incubating design talent with design centers and fashion weeks are not guaranteed to be successful. Nonetheless, these new development and their attendant dispossessions will alter the geography of inter-Asia and the fashion city, but in ways yet to be fully grasped.

Conclusion

Fast-fashion’s inter-Asian and trans-Pacific networks of families, factories, and expertise form fragile ecologies of clothing that condition our 21st-century globalized fashion industry – and act as a space for all kinds of intermediaries, risk takers, brokers – the buyers and sellers, nomads, and traders, the entrepreneurs whose ingenuity ‘grease’ the linkages of the global supply chains and in actuality float the global fashion economy. This article attempts to use a multi-sited ethnographic lens to understanding inter-urban circuits in fashion, and, in particular, how diasporic networks mediate the connections between these locales and their positioning in global value chains, exploring the interplay of urban histories and urban forms. It allows us to grasp a different kind of creativity which emerges from the unmarked, invisible histories of garment workers, whose skills were nurtured in the export factories and whose wholesale markets in fashion that still thrive on the peripheries of Asia’s cities. The fashion industry, in this way, doesn’t just occur within one site: its skill formations are multi-sited and powerfully negotiated by families in its backward and forward linkages and therefore demand an ethnography of multi-sitedness. Skills may be acquired in home countries but also invested in for skill upgrading, mobile, transnational, and transfer to other places and geographic locales.

In conclusion, understanding how fast-fashion families negotiate geography demands a different kind of lens to how we might approach the emergence of clusters, seeing them not as isolated or territorially confined, but rather as involving a complex history that stretches across spaces and constantly negotiated by multiple families and kin groups. We must therefore return to the importance of study of diasporic connections, which is integral for grasping the future of development and urbanization and its connections within Asia and across the Pacific. This article thus shows us how cities and urban forms are connected through migrant networks and knowledge flows, and by extension, points to the important contribution of ethnographic approaches for the study of ‘urban developmentalism’ in East Asia by charting how families accumulate experience from and travel through the multiple spatial forms and geopolitical economic connections that have shaped urban development in the region.