From Anna-Sophie Loweneberg:
Shanghainese writer Mian Mian shops in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury where she checks out the handmade styles of Beijing-born designer Xiao Qiao:
Here is Mian Mian in front of Giant Robot’s new San Francisco store:
Giant Robot is a Asian American pop culture magazine which now also has two stores, in LA and San Francisco. This is their self-description, taken from their website:
“From movie stars, musicians, and skateboarders to toys, technology, and history, Giant Robot magazine covers cool aspects of Asian and Asian-American pop culture. Paving the way for less knowledgabe media outlets, Giant Robot put the spotlight on Chow Yun Fat, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li years before they were in mainstream America’s vocabulary.
But Giant Robot is much more than idol worship. GR’s spirited reviews of canned coffee drinks, instant ramen packs, Japanese candies, Asian frozen desserts, and marinated bugs have spawned numerous copycat articles in other publications. GR’s historical pieces on the Yellow Power Movement, footbinding, Asian-American gangsters, and other savory topics have been cited by both academics and journalists. Other regular features include travel journals, art and design studies, and sex.
Eric Nakamura and Martin Wong launched Giant Robot magazine in 1994 with no budget, no bureaucratic meetings, and no excuses to anyone.”
There’s more about Mian Mian by Anna-Sophie Lowenberg on Danwei here; there’s more by Anna-Sophie Loewenberg on China youth culture (with the obligatory Mao reference in the headline) in a recent story on SFGate.com:
BEIJING FASHION MAO AND THEN
STYLE-CONSCIOUS ENTREPRENEURS IN POST-WTO CHINA BRING HIP U.S. BRANDS TO THE MASSES
“In his corduroys and a gray flight jacket, Li Wei Qin dresses like every Northern Chinese does during the nippy winter months — warmly. Li, 29, is from Beijing, where fashion sense has long been overwhelmed by the necessity of surviving Mongolian winter chills. His neighborhood grannies still compare long johns and ask him, “How many layers are you wearing?”
But below Li’s understated brown cords is the mark of post-World Trade Organization (WTO) China. It’s his shoes that stand out: Duane Peters Vision Street Wear skating kicks — the latest in skateboard fashion, named after the lead singer of the punk-rock band U.S. Bombs — complete with skull-and-crossbones insignia.
“These are genuine Vision Street Wear,” Li says, piecing together the label’s foreign sounds in broken English. Li insists only a handful of that style are circulating in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). “The key to my business is finding the real goods,” he says. “Where we’ve grown up, everything is fake, so real brand-name shoes are the best.”
Li is one of China’s new generation of street-smart, style-savvy fashion entrepreneurs. He makes his money dealing in authentic “factory extras” he buys on the cheap from Chinese manufacturers in southern China that produce name-brand American and European shoes for export. He then sells the shoes to boutiques in Beijing, where young hipsters are setting trends for the rest of the PRC.”
The whole story is here.