Thursday, September 22, 2011

Vera Wang's Aggressive Asian Outreach: Part III

Left: Bridal gown from a Vera Wang ad campaign in Vogue's September 2011 issue
Right: The same gown from Verawang.com Fall 2011 collection

[The gown is an off-white, almost yellow color. Wang has also made wedding gowns in dark gray, which are advertized on her website. I wrote a blog on that titled "And the Bride Wore Black." Most brides in the West still prefer to wear traditional white.]
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Vera Wang's campaign ads - for all her products from home decor to bridal wear - are also in the September 2011 issue of Vogue (a full eight pages). They are in Harper's Bazaar, as I wrote in this blog entry, and this website says that they're in September 2011 of Elle.

The September 2011 Vogue issue also had major feature article on China titled "Made in China," which I blogged about here.

The above wedding gown has the same strange "knotted" points that I describe in the 2011 Emmys gown that Wang designed for television actress Sofia Vergara. It is also characteristic of the "mounds of chiffon," i.e. a shapeless structure, which I describe here in wedding dresses Wang designed for Chelsea Clinton and other public personalities.

My other point, as I've written in the second part of "Vera Wang's Aggressive Asian Outreach," is that Wang uses exclusively a Chinese model for all her magazine campaigns. Her website is a little more "diverse," but her breakdown there is: three Asians, two whites, one Hispanic, and no blacks for the Fall 2011 collection. This is not representative of the general American population, and she has made the Asian category the dominant one.

I don't mean to belabor the racial aspect of Vera Wang's ad campaigns, but I'm only writing about what I'm observing. As I've written in several other posts, Asian "triumphalism" seems to be growing in the West, in social, cultural, academic, and even marital (inter-marriage) spheres. Partly it is their aggressive drives, and partly it is Western culture which, for some reason, seems to be under some Asian spell. As a cultural blog, my job is to report on these trends, and to decipher their origins, and their consequences.

I will be writing more on this, and more on what I see the consequences are (although I don't see them as positive).