Phillip Lim has been busy diversifying since the pandemic, not least of all as a comic book superhero in House of Slay with his fellow designing ‘Slaysians’ Prabal Gurung and Laura Kim of Oscar de la Renta. Recently, he signed on as the consulting producer for the Freeform network show Asian Baby Girl, which is set where he grew up in Orange County, California. The show focuses on the Vietnamese community in his old neighborhood of Westminster and his consulting producer role is to act as “vibe check.” The new gig got him thinking about how his friends and neighbors used to dress.
There are “around the way girl” oversize trucker shirts and eco-chinos embellished with crystals in the new lineup, rave pants in Japanese canvas and recycled ripstop, boxy sweatshirts, and “Asian golf dad” bomber jackets. A very wantable acid wash denim skirt looks like culottes because that’s how kids used to wear their Dickies, extra large and folded over in front. “It’s the 3.1 woman, but more off-duty than it has been,” Lim said.
Lim came on the scene in the mid-aughts, when American designers were looking to the Paris and Milan runways for role models, and the path to traditional success in New York was often via pretty cocktail dresses. Fashion, like pop culture more broadly, has widened its frame of reference in the 15 years since then, and Lim is taking an active role in that reframing. He has good timing. On TikTok, which might just spell the end for the top-down way the fashion industry formerly operated, Dickies have gone viral.
“Never in a trillion years did I think I’d be filming five minutes from my mom’s house, at Phuoc Loc Tho, the Asian Garden Mall,” Lim said, explaining he was headed west this week to shoot the pilot. “This is literally about ‘designing locally,’ these clothes are about where I came from. It’s not whose life is this? It feels more real.” Lim is clearly hyped by the process of exploring his roots, and that comes through in these easy-wearing pieces.
