What Fashion Can Learn From the First Generation of Asian Bloggers
Bryanboy, Susie Lau, and more Asian creators were at the forefront of the blogging boom of the late 2000s, paving the way for today's influencer culture.
It’s been over a decade since the blogosphere infiltrated high fashion and transformed the way we consume and communicate through our clothes. In 2009, influential bloggers Bryan Grey Yambao (better known by his online moniker Bryanboy) and Tommy Ton (of former Jak & Jil street style photography fame) found themselves front row at Milan Fashion Week, flanking prominent fashion editors, sitting with laptops propped in front of them, ready to review the collections in real-time. Their mere presence caused headlines: “Bloggers Crash Fashion’s Front Row” the New York Times declared, “Style Bloggers Take Center Stage” the Financial Times announced.
They signaled not only a new era of fashion media, but a new face of the industry—one that was relatable to many, had a personal voice, and represented the Asian community. Among the first generation of major bloggers, Bryanboy, Ton, Rumi Neely (of Fashion Toast), Susie Lau (AKA Susie Bubble), Tina Chen Craig (of Bag Snob), and Aimee Song (creator of Song of Style) became key content creators that laid the groundwork for the influencer culture prevalent today. Coming from various places around the world, these bloggers reached across cultures and borders. Bryanboy began his blog from his parents’ home in Manila, Philippines in 2004; Lau is British-born and Hong Kongese; and Song is Korean-American. In an industry that still has a lot of work to do in terms of the inclusion of BIPOC and other underrepresented communities, the largely self-made success of these Asian creators has helped fashion become a more culturally-aware space.
Built from personal style and fashion commentary (although the luxury partnerships and gifted designer clothes would come later), these bloggers showed the democratization of fashion media (anyone can be an influencer!) and gave Asian creators a new type of currency in the industry. Typically, Asians are found on two extremes of the fashion system—the garment workers who manufacture the clothes and those of the mega-wealthy Crazy Rich Asians variety who buy couture. It’s a dichotomy that fashion scholar Minh-Hà T. Pham looks at in her book Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet, which analyzes the rise of the Asian fashion blogger, what Pham calls “a new kind of Asian fashion worker.”
Writing about the capital that these figures gained since their emergence in the late 2000s, she says, “The bloggers’ online activities generate indirect and direct value for themselves and various entities connected to the fashion industry. In contrast to the earlier proletariat notion of the Asian fashion worker, the superblogger is considered to be part of a new Asian creative class. Instead of being seen as unskilled and oppressed, superbloggers are described in terms that emphasize their imagination, ingenuity, and vision.”
And while blogging itself has fallen out of favor, many of these creators have done just as well on Twitter and Instagram, and now even TikTok, and leveraged their online success into lasting relationships with major luxury brands, or gone on to launch their own fashion or beauty lines.
However, it’s still an uphill battle for representation at the highest echelons of the industry. Lau recently penned an article for British Vogue that speaks about the “bamboo ceiling” that Asian people are up against, along with the invisibility, tokenization, model minority myth, and appropriation that shape our experiences not only in fashion but in general. She also cites a New York Times report that showed that minimal progress has been made in terms of hiring more Black people in the industry—in any position, not just on the senior level—even after the calls for change that rang out with the Black Lives Matter movement. "The same fate is likely to befall [East and South East Asian]/AAPI people wanting to enter fashion," Lau writes.
Now, in light of the recent hate crimes targeting East and South East Asian people, each one of the previously mentioned former bloggers has used their current platforms to support #StopAsianHate and educate their audiences on the discrimination that AAPI communities and those of the global Asian diaspora face. Ever driving fashion forward, these original Asian fashion bloggers remind us that change begins with the individual, but is felt collectively.
