One time, an American politician-
Jimmy Carter says: “We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic.
Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes,
different dreams.” And to finish this quote one can say… “but all of those are to
fulfill one goal- the American Dream”.
There is no doubt that America
is a multicultural country and people who live there have (apart from the
indigenous inhabitants) different ancestors, sometimes from Africa, sometimes
from Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and sometimes
even from the far east, I mean China or Japan. It is easily visible that those people
grow in power and contribute to the fact that the U.S has many different faces.
This is why the modernity mingles with the tradition, haute couture with street
style or sport with elegance. Each ethnic minority gives something from its
national traditions and all of them create one coherent whole. Thanks to it,
eyes from all over the world are fixed upon America.
As far as the world of fashion
is concerned, right now, the most outstanding and at the same time influential
are the Americans of Chinese origins. It is even more clear when one takes a
closer look at The Parsons New School for Design. 40 % of all students are
Asians who either were born in the U.S or came there in order to purchase their
dreams.
At the moment, I think that
they are those talented young Asians’ designers who get the business going and above all, my favorite one is Alexander Wang. In my view, he has taken
the fashion industry by storm and greatly finds himself in it.
To cut a long story short, he was born and raised in
San Francisco but being at the age of eighteen he moved to NYC to try his hand
at designing clothes. Wang was a student of aforementioned The Parsons New
School for Design but actually he has never finished it. Still, he gained some practical
knowledge (eg. tailoring skills) which being mixed with his new and fresh ideas
enabled him to launch his first women’s ready-to-wear collection in 2007. Wang
favors everyday clothes so he uses standard patterns, sizes factory equipment
and faster construction techniques in order to keep the costs low. His style
can be described as a casually urban due to cut, color and patterns.
Wang’s
woman is a bit tough and masculine, she
listens to grunge and is inspired by this style. She takes an advantage of dark
and grey colors and wants to be casually cool. Sometimes, when her mood changes,
she chooses a cashmere sweater, cozy cardigan or oversized blazer, baggy
trousers and match them with shrunken vests. She mixes vintage and haute
couture and simultaneously adds a bit of modernity. Alexander Wang is now one
of the hottest name in the world of fashion. His talent and clarity of vision was
appreciated by Vogue magazine and that is why he won the CFDA/ Vogue Fashion
Fund in 2008. Then, in 2009 he was announced as the winner of the Swarovski
Womenswear Designer and the recipient of the Swiss Textilies Award. Due to
those awards (and money he earned thanks to them) he was able to open his first
shop on Grand Street in Soho.