The Diverging Fashion Styles in US and Asia: Consequence of American Racism against Asians?

Walking on the streets of America after more than a year of absence from permanent residence, I cannot help but notice that many of the fashion trends prevalent during my years in high school and college have not changed much. In fact, if anything, the trends have been greatly intensified. For instance, the most noticeable one has been the affinity of the American youth toward loose-fitting pants that are pulled down to the level of their butts. After all these years the pants seem to have only gotten looser and the level of the pants' waist have become lower and lower.

In contrast, the trends in Asia have moved in the opposite direction. The adherence to the American urban dress culture (loose jeans, decorated T-shirts, sneakers, etc) has been significantly altered along Asian tastes in the past few years. Jeans have been becoming noticeably tighter, T-shirts are becoming increasingly abandoned in favor of causal dress shirts, and the Asian love for black-rimmed glasses and baseball caps see little parallels in here in the States. The overall Asian "fashion sense" would be subject to much ridicule in America, and vice versa.

Partially, the increasing difference is a matter of differing attitude toward fashion. In Asia, one's fashion is a matter of expressing social conformity to established social norms of beauty and physical decency. While in the West, one's fashion is a matter of expressing individuality and more often than not for the youth, a rebellious deviation from the established social norms of society. Popularity is everything for Asian fashion while the case is not always obvious in the West.

But such difference in social attitudes cannot be the entire story behind the divergence. In an age when American fashion, based on widely available portrayal in fashion magazines and still popular Hollywood movies, the glorification of America should not be that quickly abandoned. Even though plenty now have doubts about living in America, American styles are still symbols of "coolness" widely admired among Asian youths. To entirely reject such an important component of American culture as street fashion would make no logical sense.

So, with the assumption that American cultural influence has not significantly declined among the fashionable youth, what can cause these youngsters to blatantly ignore the fashion trends across the Pacific? The answer, in my opinion, my lay in the increasing self-consciousness Asians are having with regard to the biological differences of the "Americans" and the Asians. They are gradually becoming more and more "aware" that the clothing that "fit" the "Americans" are not usually the most suitable ones for Asians.

America is certainly to blame for Asian's new-found independent views on fashion. Looking at the same magazines and Hollywood movies still so popular in Asia, how often are Asians depicted as cool beautiful young main characters sporting spotless fashion? Very rarely. And even when Asians are indeed portrayed by the magazines and movies, their looks are often so different from what Asians consider to be "Asian beauty" that their fashion sense often just become an extension of their physical ugliness.

American media's outright racism against Asians, portraying them as mostly incapable of "being fashionable," has led to a quiet but almost unanimous backlash among Asians against American fashion sense. Sure, American fashion look good on non-Asians, but American fashion would not be good on Asians. Otherwise, why would there be so few "cool" fashionable young Asians in the American celebrity scene? To such a question, most Americans really cannot say anything beyond words implying that Asians, especially the men, do not represent physical beauty in their eyes.

Ironically, prevalent plastic surgery in Asia still sees making people look more Caucasian (bigger eyes, higher noses, whiter skin) as a major goal. It shows that, with proper public displays, the aesthetic values of America and the Western world can still capture Asian hearts. With more young, Western-looking Asians sporting loose pants and T-shirts in American magazines and movies, perhaps we will be able to see a reversing convergence of fashion sense on the two sides of the Pacific.