https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920517716748 Critical Sociology 1–14 © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0896920517716748 journals.sagepub.com/home/crs Fashion City: Diasporic Connections and Garment Industrial Histories Between the US and Asia Christina H. Moon The New School, Parsons School of Design, USA Abstract This article explores how fashion is key to understanding the material legacies of urban development across East Asia, New York, and Los Angeles. Here, fashion is not just a material object, but a historical set of practices, relations, and migrant narratives. Fashion’s postcolonial legacies and diasporic connections have played a significant role in the development of industrial districts, special economic zones, and knowledge clusters across the Pacific. Likewise, fashion workers and designers continue to shape new urban geographies that stretch across and connect the US and Asia. Drawing upon ethnographic multi-sited fieldwork, and auto-ethnographic reflection, this article examines how the interplay between these industrial histories in garments, markets, labor and design, is shaped by both trans-Pacific and inter-Asian diasporic connections (across New York, LA, Seoul, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai): connections that are vital for understanding the urbanization of contemporary fashion economies across the US and Asia. Keywords fashion, families, Korean diaspora, labor, garment factories, multi-sited ethnography, cities, Asia Introduction A couple of years ago, I was invited to speak at the Korean Apparel Manufacturing Association meetings in Seoul in my capacity as Director of the Fashion Studies program at Parsons, the design school I teach at in New York. I was asked to speak of the rise of New York as a global fashion capital, and approached the talk naively, without realizing that there were government officials and policy makers in the room. The audience was interested in understanding how fashion was going to change the city of Seoul, bring in foreign investment and cultivate an image of Seoul as a global cultural center and symbol of modernity across Asia and beyond. The large audience asked ques- tions on how the fashion industries in Seoul and New York were going to grow economically in the Corresponding author: Christina H. Moon, School of Art and Design History and Theory, Parsons, the New School for Design, 2 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10011, USA. Email: moonc@newschool.edu 716748CRS 0 0 10.1177/0896920517716748Critical SociologyMoon research-article 2017 Article