The Fashion Diaries of Jeannie Jay Park

What does your model *actually* glimpse like appropriate now?

“It truly is tricky to place one word to my design simply because suitable now it seems loudly choice and multi-dimensional. It is mainly unpredictable and experimental—it’s perspective, it truly is rage, it’s pleasure, it is spontaneity, it is revolution, it is humanity. It’s playing with special, sustainable finds and exploring new styles, materials, textures, and colors to engage in with. I have been radically deconstructing the stereotypes and myths placed onto us as Asian Individuals and, as a final result, have been deconstructing my closet. I’ve also been attempting to locate longevity and long lasting sustainability in my design and style, usually valuing top quality more than amount and humanity in excess of traits. I recycle a great deal of the very same garments, the types I appreciate, that have represented who I have been through distinctive sections of my journey. I appreciate upcycling apparel I have outworn—deconstructing them and obtaining new daily life and beauty in the previous. Just isn’t that what lifestyle is all about? In this sense, apparel are additional than just dresses. They’re a enormous vessel for us in this lifetime to explore who we are as interconnected humans and to perform our element in communicating the globe we stand for.”

“This is the most ‘me’ you’ll definitely at any time see me. Chill me. Careless me. This is what I might wear on a summer time working day in NYC if I was acquiring all set to go on established all day, head to a protest, or just hang around and commit the working day roaming. Regardless of what the occasion, the Mom bag is generally with me. The Mom bag is upcycled ethically from deadstock Italian wool knits and is reversible. I actually preferred to style and design a multi-objective realistic and ethical bag that we could get with us working day or night, whilst ensuring that it was still colorful, unique, and a person of a form. This bag represents how manner requires to evolve and adapt with us as humanity grows, created and handmade in our hometown, New York City, and produced by our nearby Asian gals artisans as a signifies to protect Asian females. A hundred p.c of income from the Mom bag are getting donated to Asian Gals Alliance, an motion-oriented community dedicated to defending marginalized AAPI females and elders by driving social, political, and economic alter for AAPI women and youth, and combating to end Asian dislike.

“On par with our core values powering the generation of the Mom bag, I really like supporting POC-owned, sustainable and moral companies. My leading is from my fellow Korean-American friend’s neighborhood modest business enterprise, Tae Park, designed ethically in NYC. The shorts are my complete most repeated bottoms of the summer months: upcycled classic rice bag shorts from a friend’s vintage Filipina-American-owned brand name, Frou Frou (DM them to source a very similar pair). Ironically, I have been viewing this rice bag trend a ton recently, and I think it is so telling of the post-racial era we are in, where it is really now fashionable to have on the really very same rice bags that I grew up hiding in the pantry every single time my friends would occur in excess of (alongside with any sign of my Asian-ness) immediately after being created fun of for my Korean lunches all through my entire childhood. Wearing these shorts now tends to make me experience like I can reclaim my electrical power and absolutely represents how our generation of Asian Americans are capable to tell our very own tales in our way. The flannel is also a single of my most-worn items in my closet appropriate now and is from just one of my all-time favorite brands, R13, launched by Vietnamese designer Chris Leba. I like their deconstructed style and how loud they are with their designs. The footwear are from Chinese-American designer Phillip Lim 3.1, who has been serving to make extraordinary strides for our Asian-American group in the face of detest. The sun shades are from my pal Elisa Johnson‘s new brand—she’s seriously breaking the mould as a Black girl CEO and independent designer, striving to make luxury extras far more very affordable and obtainable for youth POC.

“None of these parts are mass made. Each report of outfits styles my tale in how I determined to present myself to the world currently, to connect who I am and to stand for humanity by means of the dresses on my back again. Now I made a decision to say that I would uplift my Asian-American group, stand for BIPOC solidarity, and of that, I am loud and unapologetic.”

Do you have a go-to outfit formula, or do you prefer to change it up when acquiring dressed?

“I prefer to switch it up centered on how I am emotion that working day. But if I experienced a go-to outfit formula, it would be repeating, reusing, recycling! I am a enormous outfit repeater, and I don’t find any shame in that. If everything, I want to normalize the thought that someone like me would repeat outfits since in this working day and age of quickly vogue, we require to be focused on how we can lengthen the lifetime cycle of our apparel. 1 of the finest approaches I repeat my garments is as a result of layering. I can use the very same piece various times in a row, and if I layer it in different ways, it still feels contemporary and remarkable.”

“I like a typical button-up, and especially 1 which is modern and sustainable. This outsized Tae Park boyfriend shirt desires nothing at all else. I’m constantly enjoying all-around with diverse methods of carrying my clothes, so this is the functional, slow-trend piece of my goals. I paired it with the Mom bag in the Lee colorway (named after my mom). No matter whether I’m sporting it close to the dwelling or jogging out for a seashore day, this is the greatest functional outfit—reverse the bag to bring it from day to night time! I always want to know wherever each individual report of garments arrived from—who designed them, who touched them? You would not just pick someone off the street and start out courting them ahead of you even knew where they came from, you know? That’s how I sense about my outfits.”

In conditions of elegance, what does your plan search like, and how has that impacted your model?

“I’ve struggled with embracing my magnificence for as long as I can try to remember, primarily the parts of it that have built me uniquely me. Expanding up, I was most bullied for my eyes. Coming from a childhood the place I struggled with embracing my unique attractiveness, it ended up enabling the shame and shell I formed all over my Asian identity—from pounding much too much makeup on my confront to carrying tons of eyeliner and eyeshadow to cover my eyes and take away from their uniqueness. Now I’m all about cleanse beauty—a vintage no-make-up makeup look that strives to embrace all the distinctive characteristics that make me, me—and sometimes I will increase a slender winged eye to truly spotlight the newfound natural beauty I find in my eyes.”

“This costume and I have had a extensive enjoy affair for the final 3 a long time. It is designed by Chinese-American designer Kim Shui, who modernizes qipaos and regular Chinese-type dressing though also making use of the sustainable solution of digital printing. I have worn it plenty of periods. I can always rely on this costume to make me truly feel effective at my very low details. After almost three a long time of carrying it as a lengthy-sleeve dress, I decided to detach the sleeves and make garters to go with the costume, adding a new feeling of daily life and objective. It is even much more particular being aware of that I have carried this dress with me as a result of all these a long time, by so quite a few diverse phases and paths of my everyday living. Now I use the sleeves with other tank tops when I want to add spice. Extending its lifecycle, I really feel as nevertheless I truly essentialized the humanity at the rear of my manner with this piece—repeating, reusing, reconstructing.

“Paired with the Mother bag in the Kim colorway (named after my grandmother, a Korean-American war refugee and happy immigrant), this number tends to make me experience like I’m loudly declaring the newly reworked me, as a happy Korean-American woman, even though also holding house for the youthful woman who tried using so tricky to cover who she truly was. Right after a life time of working with the facade of vogue to disguise who I really was, I now choose to liberate myself by apparel, to use my design and style as an asset to connect who I am to the outer environment.”

What prospects does vogue present you with?

“Manner provides me with the option to advocate for racial sustainability and offers me the uncommon company to express myself as boundlessly as I want. Fashion is over and above apparel. It is my picked out love language to myself and to the planet. Ethnic identification and trend are inseparable. As a initially-technology Korean-American woman, I have employed style as a channel of liberation from my inherent varieties of identity and a usually means of expressing a cultural and social id that I could mold independently. It allows me to liberate myself from the frustrating stereotyping, orientalism, tokenization, and fetishization that has weighed on my back again my entire lifetime as an Asian lady.

“The exploitation of Asian gals in the manner industry’s provide chain goes hand in hand with our exploitation throughout all realms, together with myself as a product, activist, academic, and innovative. All through my entire daily life, I’ve been instructed I are unable to dress in what I want to in order to be taken significantly since my design is possibly far too loud or way too risqué. To that, I say hear to the messages that lay powering my garments, the humanity guiding my style, because it really should be loud. It is really disruption, and my type is mostly how I have strived to humanize myself in my individual eyes in a earth that dehumanizes Asian lives—especially the life of Asian women of all ages.

“Traditionally, this thought of ‘fashion’ has been a way for human beings to converse their identities and to connect with one yet another. It can be the outermost expression of the self we connect to the outside the house entire world, inherently commodifying and racializing the overall body from its pure, organic variety into the realms of culture and society in this perception, as an Asian woman, style has normally been political. All over heritage, we have witnessed the strategy that a bodily garment below the label of ‘fashion’ is an individual’s illustration of nationhood, identity, privilege, and electric power. Now it really is a dilemma of how we use this privilege and electrical power for the higher superior, to make trend selections with intention that finally form our group and humanity. In 2021 your vogue requirements to stand for a little something. When we pick to aid little, sustainable Asian, Black, or other POC-owned makes, when we consciously listen, support, and amplify the communities marginalized by trend via our possess, that’s when we reconnect with the humanity guiding it. That is mainly the mission behind Sanitation Country: creating intentional activism via fashion that cultivates humanity and provides group to vogue.”

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