""The Beautiful Generation" is a pleasure to read and a model of how cultural studies ought to be done. Thuy Linh Tu's elegant, well-crafted account of the fashion industry demonstrates the impossibility of separating the aesthetic from the material, or the cultural from the economic. It shows how the changing roles of culture in the global economy can be luminously traced through a focused, interdisciplinary methodology."--Kandice Chuh, author of "Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique"

Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu is Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies at New York University. She is a co-editor of Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America, also published by Duke University Press, and TechniColor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life.

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Fashion, Free Trade, and the "Rise of the Asian Designer" 1
Part I
1. Crossing the Assembly Line: Skills, Knowledge, and the Borders of Fashion 31
2. All in the Family? Kin, Gifts, and the Networks of Fashion 63
Part II
3. The Cultural Economy of Asian Chic 99
4. "Material Mao": Fashioning Histories Out of Icons 133
5. Asia on My Mind: Transnational Intimacies and Cultural Genealogies 169
Epilogue 203
Notes 209
Bibliography 239
Index 253