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Asian models. by Kime
It's hard not to miss the Asian model invasion that's happening in the fashion industry. There's Liu Wen looking luminous in the Estee Lauder billboards and Shu Pei in elegant repose in the Vera Wang ads. There's a group of them in a modern remake of a Cecil Beaton photograph in the pages of American Vogue (December 2010). Tao Okamoto and Ming Xi show off the season's must-have maxi coats in the fall 2011 issue of T magazine while Sun Fei Fei stars in the Carine Roitfeld-directed campaigns of Barney's New York. This ubiquity of female Asian models begs the question, Where are their male counterparts?
Is men's fashion just as slow to embrace models of Asian descent as it is new trends? When will there be a Chinese man on the cover of GQ or Details? Where is the male equivalent of Liu Wen, the gentleman who'll sell millions of grooming products to Asian men? Where is the Asian male model who will set a new masculine ideal?
When I was growing up, the male models of the day were Markus Schenkenberg and Mark Vanderloo, men of Nordic looks and muscled physiques. The impact this had on an Asian boy like me lingers to this day. I wanted soft, wavy hair like theirs but what I had was stiff, coarse mop that has been likened to steel wool. I wanted their angular features with the prominent jaw line and narrow nose, instead my face is all cheekbones and a barely there jaw, and a nose as wide as a landing strip. And while I have been able to sort of tame my hair with countless bottles of Kerastase potions, there are days when I still crave for that leonine European mane. I digress.
There have been efforts in fashion to be more inclusionary of Asian male models. There's Francis Lane in the Tommy Hilfiger fall/winter 2011 ads, but you have to look hard to find him in the group photograph of mostly white models wearing WASP-y clothes. It's the same with the Dolce & Gabbana and Givenchy ads featuring Daisuke Uede and Paolo Roldan, respectively. Turn the pages of the magazine too quickly and you might just miss them. Are these efforts merely to be politically correct? Are they choosing Asian models who look more white than Asian to somehow blend with the mostly Caucasian cast?
True, there was Godfrey Gao, the first ever-Asian model to land a Louis Vuitton campaign and Philip Huang is ubiquitous on the runways. But it would be nice to see more Asian faces on the runways and in American and European magazines so that the boys growing up in China, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and other parts of Asia would have role models they can relate to, models who have the same skin color or facial features as them. It's one thing to aspire to a certain ideal, say the look of Sean O'Pry or Garrett Neff, it's another to never be able to attain or even come close to that standard of perfection. Maybe the spring/summer 2012 collections in New York, which start tomorrow, will change all that. Here's to hoping.
Are we Asians finally embracing our own kind? Are the days of 'white is always better' over? Will there no longer be a market for whitening creams? Will we come to love our flat noses and dark eyes?
If we were to take our cues from the fall 2011 advertising campaign of luxury retailer Lane Crawford, it would seem that we Asians have come to love our own. The campaign features a stunning all-Chinese cast wearing the latest threads from New York, Milan, London and Paris. Headlining the lineup is Estee Lauder's first-ever Asian model Liu Wen. She is joined by her compatriots FeiFei Sun, Ming Xi, Shu Pei and Xiao Wen Ju . This is a great follow-up to the Givenchy Spring/Summer 2011 haute couture show that only had Asian models.
Several of the Chinese models in Lane Crawford's Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott-photographed campaign, also star in Vogue China's September issue. They are joined by pioneering Chinese supermodel Du Juan and relative newcomer Sui He, all of them in different jewel tone Gucci frocks. This is Vogue China's sixth anniversary issue. Its debut cover featured then girl-of-the-moment Gemma Ward flanked by five Chinese models. In hindsight, that cover may have been a precursor of things to come. It could have been the signal of the start of a fashion revolution: the Chinese are going to take over the world.
Vera Wang, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and Giorgio Armani are only a handful of designers who have featured Chinese mannequins in their ad campaigns in efforts to court the second largest luxury consumers in the world. All that's missing is a Vogue Italia Chinese Issue similar to its Black Issue from July 2008.
What does this all mean? Is the Chinese luxury consumer now aspiring to be like the Chinese faces modeling
her favorite brands? Is she relating more to models with features similar to hers instead of the conventional go-to blond and blue-eyed beauties? Or is this just another fad? The industry's new form of tokenism?
Besides the seventies influences, long, fluid skirts, and colors to shock winter darks into submission on the spring runways, there was something else that seemed just as refreshing and relevant: the presence of Asian models from Lincoln Center to the Grand Palais. We saw Liu Wen, with her sculptural, diamond-shaped cheekbones, at Lanvin, Oscar de la Renta, Michael Kors, and more. Tokyo-raised Tao Okamoto, she of the Beatles bowl cut, walked for Givenchy, Carolina Herrera, and Ralph Lauren (she has also appeared in the label's ad campaign). The full-lipped, hypnotic-eyed Feifei Sun from Shandong, China, appeared in 39 shows in her second season. And these women are not just selling high fashion. Poised, porcelain doll-faced Du Juan (she trained as a ballerina in Shanghai) and Shu-Pei Qin, her brows like accent marks, loom large on Gap billboards; Estée Lauder recently took on Wen as a new face, the first ethnic model since Liya Kebede, in 2003, to represent the classically American beauty powerhouse; and Qin,
from Henan, China, has signed a contract with Maybelline. In September, The New York Times proclaimed Asian designers "the future of fashion," citing the rash of newly emerged talent: Alexander Wang, Phillip Lim, Jason Wu, Derek Lam, Thakoon Panichgul, Richard Chai, and Prabal Gurung. Now these ascendant models of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean descent appear to be redrawing the front lines of beauty, too.
While I am unequivocally rooting for this moment in fashion, I can't help thinking, They want us? How I wish I could have seen the Asian models of today staring back at me from magazine pages or television screens when I was a Korean-American teenager in the Midwest, wrestling with foundation shades of "bisque," "honey," and "sand" in my local Walgreens. (I walked around for some time with a mismatched face and neck.) They would have felt familiar, igniting a spark not necessarily of validation, but at least of recognition.
I was adopted in 1976 as a four-month-old by a Caucasian family in a suburb of Minneapolis, a town of Lutheran blondes with two-story houses and Scandinavian or German last names. My parents had my sister within two years, and we grew up wearing matching dresses in different colors (mine, usually red; hers, blue), our long hair curled and tied with ribbons. When I was in junior high school, my mother decided to take me to the counter at Dayton's, where she bought her cosmetics, to get my color wheel done, not in any ceremonial mother-daughter bonding way but in a this-is-how-women-are-expected-to-look way. To my embarrassment, the consultant in her white lab coat seemed flummoxed that I didn't have creased lids on which to apply "my colors"--seashell pink and dark plum that would "open up brown eyes"--though she did muddle through. By the merciful end, I looked like a Bratz doll gone awry with color-blocked clothes, a frizzy spiral perm, and frosty mauve lipstick.
Today's Asian models are not, of course, entirely without precedents. Marie Helvin, born to an American GI father and a Japanese mother, palled around with Jerry Hall in the seventies, and Filipina Anna Bayle joined Yves Saint Laurent's cabine around the same time. Of German and Japanese descent, Tina Chow was photographed by Cecil Beaton and Arthur Elgort and was a fixture of the New York art scene in the 1980s. In the nineties, the edgy Jenny Shimizu was known for her CK One ads (and her relationship with Angelina Jolie), and the exotic-alien Irina Pantaeva, with the high cheekbones of a Siberian warrior, was championed by Karl Lagerfeld. As striking as these women were, they were rare, extreme creatures, hothouse flowers in the landscape rather than examples of anyone we--or I in particular--knew firsthand.
With no guidance or role models with whom to identify, I experimented on my own, with disastrous results. Mascara made my downward-curling, sparse lashes clump together, misapplied peach bronzer left me orange, and chunky highlights transformed me into a dead ringer for Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha. Despite all my efforts and the exorbitant sums I paid to achieve my own version of my mother's, sister's, and aunt's ashen highlights, I was no Cindy Crawford; I was not even me. My parents, who used the term Oriental, and I rarely talked about my feelings as an outsider. Their responses were more consolation--"You're different; don't worry about it"--than a celebration of difference.
My sense of isolation changed after a college trip to Seoul, organized by the agency that handled my adoption, for adoptees to experience the culture lost to them. Everything I knew about beauty and myself had the opposite meaning in the city of my birth. At five foot six I was not as average as I felt back home, and I was not meant to have fried, brassy hair or a ruddy, blotchy complexion from excessive tanning. Going into a drugstore was a revelation: aisles of hair-dye boxes in shade after shade of dark brown and black. For the first time, I was surrounded by people who mostly looked like me. I say "mostly" because I saw endless variations of facial features and body type and bone structure and hairstyle, all within the Asian race. The experience was electrifying and led me eventually to change my last name to the one I was born with. Under reason for change on the paperwork I filled out in a government office downtown, I simply wrote "personal preference." "Chang," which I knew from the scant information in my adoption file, was the only tie I had to a culture, my culture. It was a way of connecting to my lineage and identity, a way to present myself to the world as who and what I was. The first time I made a restaurant reservation under my new name, hearing it aloud like a declaration, I felt neither liberation nor relief exactly, only that it made sense.
About the Author
Kime Huang
My name is Kime Huang I am an ingenious blogger i loves all things design and technology. On line gossip is my hobby I also love book reading and I also have founded several other interesting blogs. Do keep in touch with him at Facebook .