The cruel joke of cashing in on Lunar New Year

New year, new marketing scheme. This is essentially the motto for Western brands when Lunar New Year comes back around. Just look at the limited-edition Lunar New Year Stanley cup, a cream or red tumbler with some dragon scale detailing, that sold out in 30 minutes.

The 3,500-year-old holiday was celebrated over the weekend in China, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand and other diasporic communities. While each culture has their own traditions to honor the new year according to the lunisolar calendar, the holiday is largely about attracting luck, wealth and good health for the future. Unsurprisingly, the West has taken the holiday for itself and managed to use it to its own advantage. With brands dropping successful Lunar New Year collections, it’s predominantly white people who are raking in the cash for the holiday despite not finding any meaning in it.  

Gaining mainstream popularity in America, the holiday has prompted marketing that is rampant and omnipresent. Here Lunar New Year means simply reselling items in a new red colorway or slapping a zodiac animal on a bag and selling it for $895 (yes, this is real, and yes it is sold out at Coach). NBC has traced the commercialization of the holiday to the ‘90s when China became a powerful economic player, and the aggressive selling tactics have clearly paid off. Nike, Stanley cups, Barbie, H&M, Kate Spade – brands big or small, luxury or fast fashion have dropped collections for 2024’s Lunar New Year. 

The fashion industry in particular cashes in on the holiday — even Lululemon, the athletic apparel brand whose founder dismissed valuing diversity and chose the brand’s name in order to laugh at how Japanese people can’t pronounce the “L” sound. Their special Lunar New Year collection was just their pre-existing legging, puffers, and sweaters in . . . red. Maybe they’re also celebrating Valentine’s Day.

Judging by Lululemon, companies are able to put their anti-Asian racism aside for the blatant cash grab that is Lunar New Year. When considering fashion’s history with perpetuating Asian stereotypes, and in particular myths about Asian women, this phenomenon proves to be the rule rather than the exception. 

This history is unpacked in Anne Anlin Cheng’s “Ornamentalism,” a book that explores how the West’s notion of Asian women is constructed through a relation to objects, hence the title’s portmanteau of orientalism and ornament. Cheng's book begins on August 24, 1924 when a ship carrying almost 600 Chinese passengers landed at the San Francisco harbor and everyone was approved to disembark except 22 young Chinese women. The reason is a tale modern women know all too well: they were deemed “lewd” because of the way they were dressed. The women, including a woman named Chy Lung, were believed to be prostitutes despite carrying proper paperwork. What followed was the first time a Chinese litigant appeared before America’s highest courts. In Chy Lung v, Freeman, the defendants, lacking any real evidence for their decision or understanding of Chinese dress codes, used the women’s fashion as an argument as to why they are prostitutes. Floral patterns on clothes, accessories in the hair, silk fabric: the horror! Clothing-related condemnations created a lasting impression on the American people’s early understanding of the “dangerously immoral” Asian women, even after the court ruled in favor of Lung in the highly public trial.

The fashion industry has continued to hypersexualize Asian feminity, notably through the prevailing sexualization of traditional Asian dresses like China’s qipao or cheongsam. A 2022 article from Gal-Dem, “When will fashion brands stop sexualising the cheongsam?” notes that many are sold under the lingerie category but even before that, they were a site of sexual and fetish fantasies. In 1977, Yves Saint Laurent debuted a Chinese collection replete with cone-shaped hats, qipaos, and exposed midriffs and yet . . . no actual Asian women in sight. Jean Paul Gautier took a similar route in his 2001 collection, featuring see-through tops with Mandarin collars and pankou (the knotted fastenings used on qipaos), form-fitting cheongsams and skirts and dresses with slits aplenty. The models for the collection were not Asian yet Vogue still described them as “Gaultier’s Far-Eastern courtesans.” 

Fast forward to 2015 and things have only become more blatant. An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “China: Through the Looking Glass” featured esteemed fashion houses — Alexander McQueen, Yves Saint Laurent and John Galliano — whose designs can only be called a feast of aesthetic Asian clichés. Roberto Cavalli’s evening dress is decked in porcelain-like patterns. Valentino’s evening dress from the Shanghai Collection deals in traditional Chinese brocade. Saint Laurent and Tom Ford continue to weave the same silk Lung and her contemporaries were condemned for. Elsewhere, dragons run amok. The introductory sign at the exhibit happily notes that these so-called Asian aesthetics are not meant to be authentic: “For the designers in this exhibition, China represents a land of free-floating symbols [...] Like Marco Polo or Gulliver, they are itinerant travelers to another country, reflecting on its artistic and cultural traditions as an exoticized extension of their own . . .” 

The same introduction could hang in front of the 2024’s Lunar New Year collections. Authenticity is nowhere to be found in fashion’s take on the multicultural holiday which manages to be simultaneously marketed toward consumers of Asian descent yet does not engage in any real history or tradition. In making their products geared towards Asians, these brands reveal their own stereotypical beliefs. Fendi’s Asian-ification resulted in a Pokemon collab, while Loewe leaned into jade, and Nike delivered a garishly gold brocade sneaker, because anime for Asians? Groundbreaking.

When Cheng describes the Met collection — “ [It] rehearses [. . .] that opulence and sensuality are the signature components of Asiatic character; that Asia is always ancient, excessive, feminine, available, and decadent; that material consumption promises cultural possession; that there is no room in the Orientalist imagination for national, ethnic, or historical specificities” — it’s easy to believe she’s describing the multitude of designers’ Lunar New Year collections today. The ultra-luxury nature of many of these holiday drops further the idea of Asian people as lavish, like everyone is a “Crazy Rich Asian.” Bottega’s Veneta’s Lunar New Year collection features a take on their Jodie bags with scale-like detailing to honor the year of the dragon, yet it’s noticeably more expensive than the bag’s regular price point. In the mid-size version, the Lunar New Year bag is $4,700, up from the regular bag of the same size’s $3,500. Loewe, on the other hand, partnered with Chinese jade masters to create pendants for the small price of $14,061 a piece. 

Hollywood taught us that characterizations can fall prey to stereotypes of Asian people, but so too can aesthetics. Not only are these visual motifs neither contextual nor representative of China, much less the many cultures that celebrate Lunar New Year, but they also perpetuate the “Asia is ancient” belief that Cheng describes. The multitude of centuries-old or traditional patterns and materials in the collection continues to depict Asia as a folkloric, kung fu land, perpetuating the idea that non-white cultures are stuck in the past, lagging behind the technologically advanced and oh-so-civilized West. 

While these collections may not be as engaged in the explicit hypersexual dress codes as the Met exhibit, they continue the Met's and fashion’s strategy of using fantasies of Asia to sell products, to literally objectify Asia. This is true even for the Asian collaborators of fashion’s holiday collections, where they come to serve a secondary purpose. Lululemon debuted their collection in collaboration with "Everything Everywhere All at Once" Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh, as if to disguise the company’s racist history. Many brands, Aritzia for example, use this time as an opportunity to perform allyship by working with an Asian designer, nevermind that their clothing has been called out for misrepresenting Asian culture. Even in Aritzia’s own drop, people have called out how Chinese iconography and traditions are conflated with Korean culture. Once again, to be Asian is to be the accessory to a Western goal, to be put to use. 

These drops continue the idea that Asian people are exotic, decadent, and thus something to possess, which, as events from the past few years like 2021’s Atlanta spa shooting prove, create dangerous narratives. One in three Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders still reported facing racial abuse in 2023.

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The fashion industry’s commodification of a cultural holiday descends from a long lineage of crafting Asian personhood through objects. The Lunar New Year collections take this one step further, turning not just people but an entire swath of Asian cultures into its own monolithic aesthetic. When white consumers purchase these collections, they do so without knowing or caring about the holiday’s meanings and history, merely seeing the culture as a style that they want to try on. The marketing is so vast and popular, some Asian consumers can’t help but to buy into this fantasy of their own culture too, coughing up hundreds of dollars to brands who are exploiting them. The fashion industry has turned Lunar New Year into its own cruel joke: in giving these brands money, prosperity and blessings are the last things being bestowed on the people who actually celebrate the holiday .