Critical cultural studies have investigated multiple aspects of fashion for a long time, and Minh-Ha Pham's book creatively examines an important area of study that has little scholarship—the personal style blogosphere—providing a critical framework to analyze digital fashion media in the era of informational capitalism. Pham starts with what she means by Asian personal style superbloggers—a very small and incredibly select group, the most elite fashion blogs in terms of online traffic, media attention, industrial collaboration, and name recognition. These elite Asian bloggers' activities are “taste work,” which has constituted the new Asian digital creative class who benefit from new user-driven technologies and knowledge to purportedly democratize online space. Pushing against such an assumption, Pham contends that the personal style bloggers' taste work does not represent a postracial or postpolitical labor identity; they neither challenge nor subvert the Western, white hegemony embedded in the fashion industry. Rather, they are complementary to the dominant structure of the fashion economy, in which the inequalities of race, class, and gender representations are profound and long-lasting. Their labor in the blogosphere is a continuation of that of Asian garment workers, and is situated in a historical, racially gendered, and class-based formation of contemporary capitalist production.
Historicizing Asian garment workers and the elite superbloggers, chapter 1 explores the formation of the economies of Asian informational fashion work through the ideas of Asian taste—racially exotic yet not so foreign as to disrupt the postracial fantasy, and easily marketable to the masses—and aftertaste—at first pleasing but later unpalatable, suggesting a shared racial and gendered organization of Asian fashion labor across two very different modes of work. Benefiting from the Asian moment in fashion and global consumer capitalism, personal style bloggers perform taste work as a continuation of the garment work carried out by Asian model minorities, exemplifying the legitimate difference and racial tolerance that illustrates the contradictory reality of liberal multicultural and postracial celebrations of diversity and difference.
Chapter 2 investigates these elite Asian bloggers' bodily articulation of racial labor through analyzing their style stories. Pham closely reads two superbloggers; Song's and Yambao's style stories elucidate their aesthetic sartorial choices as a way to fashion their racial identity as an individual characteristic rather than a social category. The aestheticization of racial labor serves either as a source of racial distinction or as a form of racial passing, both of which are within the boundary of Western legitimate difference and even reproduce “a prevailing racial stereotype about Asian tastes as cheap, tacky, and unsophisticated” (p. 104).
The racial labor is intertwined with class manifested in the blogosphere. Chapter 3 evaluates how fashion superbloggers utilize digital technologies and aesthetic techniques in outfit photos in order to enact myriad cultural, socioeconomic, and informational mobilities characterized by their eliteness. Asian superbloggers have established and popularized outfit photography as a cultural norm and common practice, offering their audience the sense of authenticity with emotional meaning and value in its relatability. Status in the blogosphere depends on the interactivity that outfit photos attract and sustain, which in turn creates a new expression of eliteness in the production and consumption of the racially gendered digital performance.
Chapter 4 furthers the argument of racially gendered fashion work through reading personal style bloggers' poses as performative labor. This type of labor has exemplified the identity work done within the blogosphere, seen in both the Susie Bubble pose, with her signature “elsewhere gaze,” and the BryanBoy pose, which has been appropriated by established fashion labels such as Fendi and Louis Vuitton. Posing as an embodied job performance helps the bloggers “exhibit their style knowledge and self-fashioning competencies to negotiate racially gendered assumptions the Western fashion public has about them” (p. 136). These poses create space for the formation of a new fashion labor market, which flips the dominant Western fashion order around to center on the marginalized Asian body, and offers alternative imaginations against the racist devaluation of Asian fashion labor.
The last chapter examines how Asian superbloggers intentionally dearticulate the time and effort devoted to self-fashioning—shopping, selecting styles, fitting, and putting on make-up—to make their taste work authentic and relate to their audience. On the one hand, they actively maintain the divide between digital and physical labors, foregrounding the technological and aesthetic conventions of outfit posting but hiding the process of self-fashioning, which effectively disassociates the concept of Asian fashion work from sweat labor required to maintain their middle-class position and status as creative people. On the other hand, their efforts to deskill personal style blogging have reaffirmed the historically defined position of women and justified the devaluation of women's work in a racially structured fashion system, thus doubly exploiting them. In other words, the more successful a blogger is, the better positioned he or she will be for increased self and corporate exploitation.
Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet is a compelling book to read, deserving critical acclaim for its originality and insightful contribution to digital fashion media studies concerning the dynamic relations of race, gender, class, and labor. It is good for researchers who are interested in, and classes where the focus is on, fashion studies; digital media; and critical cultural analysis of race, gender, and class.
