East-West Face Fashion Fissure

“Everything’s so big,” Narumi said, referring to American clothes. “And not cute.”

As I was giving a tour of Harvard to a group of Japanese girls from Hakuoh High School in Ashikaga, Narumi and her two friends Chika and Mizuki informed me that American students aren’t, well, the best of dressers. They began to list the drab colors Americans seem to favor, and just as I was about to nod my head in agreement, I glanced down at my own clothes and realized I was wearing the exact “grays, blacks, and browns” they had mentioned.

As I joined their group picture on the steps of Widener, I found myself holding my two fingers up and feeling very out of place among the mixing and matching of bright colors around me. “A duckling leading other ducklings,” my friend remarked after seeing me guiding the group of girls around campus. Well, in that case, I was feeling very much like the ugly duckling in a flock of Technicolor birds. Even their electronic dictionaries were of pearl pinks and sky blues.

Though their pocket dictionaries largely mediated our communication, the girls were able to translate the popular fashions in Japan to me: “lace,” “sporty,” American casual (pronounced “a-meri-caji”), and “dento,” or traditional. They also said cow spots are big, and continued to nod their heads as I pressed them to confirm that cow spots (“You mean black spots on white? Like ‘moo’?”) are indeed fashionable in Japan. Maybe they were hinting at leather, but regardless, the Hakuoh High School girls made it clear that they thought American and Asian dress are different.

Later that day, I attended a luncheon with several Asian designers who had recently graduated from Parsons School of Design. Angela Gao­­—who completed her thesis collection last May and recently released her ready to wear collection, ANGG—also pointed to a divergence in Eastern and Western aesthetic.

“Western style is about sex appeal,” she said. “It’s more straightforward and women are not afraid to flaunt their bodies. Eastern style is more hidden and demure, though the message is still very direct.”

A Chinese-American designer, Gao attempts to merge her two identities in her design philosophy, which in fact is centered around the Eastern proverb “Express your strengths and hide your weaknesses.” “This is the Asian way of dressing,” she said. “Show your best body part and hide what’s not flattering.” Indeed, her loose silhouettes embody easy comfort and simplicity, as do the cotton and linen materials she chooses to work with.

A combination of East and West, Gao’s clothes offer modern shapes that flatteringly fit and drape the body, at the same time evoking the linen shifts peasant-farmers wore in the late imperial period of China.

Though Gao verbalized a distinction between Asian and American style, her ability to blend East and West seamlessly in her design aesthetic suggests that perhaps the divide between the two isn’t as great as she and Narumi initially intimated. After all, Narumi listed Marc Jacobs, Abercrombie, and H&M among her favorite brands—just like any other teenage girl in America.

—Columnist Victoria D. Sung can be reached at vsung@fas.harvard.edu.