A New Art-Fashion Label Is Exploring Asian-American Identity
47 Canal is a shoebox-sized gallery on the corner of Grand and Eldridge. Owned by artist Margaret Lee, it has become a gathering point for the Asian artistic community on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It was there that Tin Nguyen and Daniel Chew chose to stage an intimate show for their label CFGNY (Concept Foreign Garments New York) late last month, an eclectic presentation that felt both like a coming-of-age moment for the rising brand and a physical manifestation of their mission statement—to explore the Asian-American experience through the lens of performative art and fashion. In other words, to render a visual and emotional meditation on Asian-American identity, while building a like-minded fashion-arts collective to support it.
A recycled cardboard sculpture of an enormous koi fish, its scales made from old tatami house slippers, cut-up orange Louis Vuitton bags, and other found materials, was caught in a large net and hung from the ceiling, above a keyboard at the center of the room. A beaming 10-year-old girl walked out in a brown brocade dress and ballet flats to play classical music, as models entered to the twinkling notes—friends of the label such as stylist Avena Gallagher, publicist Cynthia Leung, chef Angela Dimayuga. Nods to Asian cultural touchstones came fast and furious: the protrusions on mesh shirts recalled Rei Kawakubo’s iconic “Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body” collection, but here were stuffed with Charmander and Doraemon plushies to create “cute, yet grotesque tumors,” while the “New Fashion” label running down suit pants was sourced from the bootleg Ben Thanh Market in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (the collection was titled “New Fashion II”). Under the direction of stylist Alex Harrington some models carried props including a live red snapper in a plastic Chinatown grocery bag; others shuffled along in disposable house slippers and sheer tabi socks.
“Vaguely Asian” is one of the central tenets of CFGNY, a reference to the loose stereotypes shared across distinct Asian backgrounds. Nguyen was born and raised in Attleboro, Massachusetts, 40 minutes south of Boston, the youngest of five and Vietnamese; Chew grew up near San Jose in a Burmese-Chinese family. “I’m West Coast Asian, as opposed to Tin’s East Coast Asianness,” he says, laughing. “Tin and me didn’t grow up in the same culture, but we have that shared experience of being raised Asian in the West.” The two both moved to New York in 2006, Nguyen to study painting at Pratt and Chew to study film, and first crossed paths in 2013 at Project No. 8, a now defunct avant garde menswear store on Orchard where Chew worked. The shop stocked Bless, a cult art-fashion label that functions more as a creative platform or interdisciplinary studio than traditional clothing brand, and it is a model that has informed their work.
CFGNY officially launched in 2016, once Nguyen and Chew realized conceptual clothing was the best artistic medium to share their ideas. “We make the clothes and use those moments to help tell the story,” Nguyen says. “We see fashion as a vessel for us to have this dialogue we’re interested in, about race, about sexuality, about identity.” Specifically, Chew explains, they hope to explore those common Asian-American experiences: reinforced racial and sexual stereotypes of gay Asian men on Grindr, the intraracial competition stoked by tokenism, or the pain of not fully belonging in America or Asia. “We all feel that alienation and we understand each other in a very specific way,” Nguyen says. “That’s a very big common bond, the alienation that we feel.” Both emphasize that the Bernadette Corporation, a ’90s art and fashion collective, was their chief inspiration: started by three immigrant Asian kids, who also used art to explore their minority status. “Part of the project is us trying to talk to other people who have had the same experiences,” Chew adds. “Not pitying ourselves over it, but finding some power in it by banding together and empowering each other.”
The two are self-taught designers, who watched YouTube videos, solicited friends in the fashion industry for lessons and PDF patterns, and relied on intuition borne from Nguyen’s sculpting background and Chew’s childhood addiction to Internet fashion forums (obsessions included Björk and Comme des Garçons). The clincher, however, came when Nguyen remembered past trips to Vietnam, where his mother would have garments custom-made. “Tailoring is such a thing in Vietnamese culture, and as I started to take more trips to Vietnam as an adult, that’s how we were able to start the project,” he says.
Twice a year Nguyen and Chew fly to Ho Chi Minh City and head straight to Pham Ngu Lao, where the city’s street tailors create custom clothes for Westerners, too large to fit into local sizes, or remake designer garments for tourists. CFGNY relies on four of these shops, renting an apartment close by and overseeing the process for a month at a time. One shop might have six craftsmen who specialize in the cut of a dress pant, another might focus on carefully hand-stitching woven grid tops from silk. To make T-shirts, the two zipped across the city on motorbike to visit a counterfeit market and commission their own “authentic bootleg” CFGNY tees. “We’re dealing with fashion and production in a way that’s conceptual,” Nguyen says. “The West has this idea that if something is made in Asia, it’s bad quality, but we’re interested in rewriting this narrative—there is great tailoring in Vietnam.”
The scope of their project is vast and densely layered. Chew points to their use of unexpected Asian materials: A jacket whose leather was sourced from a motorbike seat producer in the industrial sector of Ho Chih Minh City, bags and pants made from recycled woven plastics that are used to create plant canopies. There are familiar fabrics sourced from local bedding and pajama factories, who stock rolls of ugly dotted florals or popular children’s cartoons. In CFGNY’s hands, they become a baseball shirt covered in Pokémon. “When you think of Asian fabrics, you think of dragons, brocade, silk, however we’re using unconventional materials in weird ways that do come from Vietnam, but don’t read as Asian,” Nguyen says. “Our references are very specific to Asians growing up, but don’t necessarily read Asian to people.” The name Concept Foreign Garments “perfectly encapsulates the ideas,” Chew adds. “It’s more the idea that it’s foreign, even though it might not be. We as Asian-American people can be considered foreign.”
Thus far, they have been supported by pre-orders from the Asian-American arts and fashion community that has happily swelled around them. (“A big dream of ours,” Chew admits, “was to get a big group of gaysians to roll up to the club together, and that’s actually happened.”) The next run will be distributed on their website, as they begin to ramp up production to meet the demand that has rocketed following the 47 Canal show—the collection’s many tongue-in-cheek details (i.e. the Pokémon shirt) have instant social media appeal. That brings us to the brand’s secondary “bootleg” name: Cute Fucking Gay New York, which sums things up nicely.
“We like the ambivalent relationship that cuteness provokes in people—you either want to protect it or destroy it—and playing with that to evoke some type of new desire,” Nguyen says. “Something grotesque, but also beautiful at the same time.”
