#ATVCelebrates Asian Heritage Month: Asian Vintage Community Directory
Hi! Today I'm introducing a new series today called ATV Celebrates. I was inspired by Black History Month and I mentioned a few times that I'd like to do a similar type of celebration for other cultures and lifestyles. ATV Celebrates is my way of bringing attention to other walks of life that don't personally pertain to me. There's another ATV Celebrates coming up next month for Pride, but I'm kicking off the series with Asian Heritage.
Asian Heritage Month is celebrated during the month of May, and from the bit of research I did I thought it only pertained to Asian-Americans, but I see Asians from different countries celebrating it as well so I'm not entirely sure. Correct me if I'm wrong though; I admit I haven't been researching it very long and wasn't sure which was correct. I've seen it celebrated in both April and May. I had to figure out a way to celebrate Asian Heritage in a way that was both inoffensive but still true to ATV, so I borrowed from my BHS Extra when I featured the Black vintage community(go check that out if you haven't seen it) and feature the Asian vintage community this time around. I saw when I was doing the Black community post that there's a lot of diversity in the vintage community at large, but when I break it down into individual ethnicities it is an even more eye-opening experience. I don't often pay attention to how many people of each ethnicity are doing something that I enjoy; if I'm being honest I'm a bit more aware now because of the times we're in, but it's not something I set out to find. If there are people who look like me doing what I like, then cool. If there aren't, that's cool too. But when I do make a point to find certain ethnicities doing the same thing, it's always something I want to share. I hope those of Asian heritage who stumble upon this post will have the pride I felt when I was looking through the Black community post back in February, and even if you don't have any Asian heritage I hope you enjoy this post as much as I enjoyed putting it together!
Pinups
Now as I mentioned in the Black vintage directory, many of the pinups and burlesque dancers do both. I just placed them in the category that they displayed the most on their pages. I owe a huge thanks to Asian Pinups (@asianpinupgirls) because I was able to get most of the names from their page. Let's get to the list!
*Mandy's Note: It was reading about the Asian Burlesque show on Calamity's feed that inspired me to create this post and by extension, the ATV Celebrates series so I actually owe her a big thanks--especially if this series takes off! Unfortunately, I am but a mere peasant so I can't talk to her. In case it's not obvious, I love this woman. lol
Mandy's Note: Gerri is a published pinup, but I think pinup has taken a temporary backseat while she focuses on being a mama. She still dresses with a vintage flair, so I've put her in the Enthusiast category.
As I'm doing with the Black vintage directory, I'm going to update this list as I find new names and I'm eventually going to get around to alphabetizing it. By the time I realized I hadn't done that with this list, I was already 75% of the way through so it was either alphabetize it then at the cost of my sanity (I've been working on this for days), or wait until I add more names...and have had time to re-collect myself. lol Also as I mentioned with my first directory list, there are undoubtedly some names I left off the list and some of that is because the profiles are private. If the profiles are private it's likely for a reason and I respect that, so I leave them off until or if the pages become public.
Anyway, I had the greatest time putting this list together. Let's start by sharing some things I noticed. There is a lot of what I call 'street pinup,' which is basically what I call the vintage answer to traditional streetwear styled fashion. Speaking of style, there was a bunch of versatility in the context that many of the models didn't solely do pinup and some didn't even primarily do pinup, which I loved. There was so much high fashion, so many artistic shots, but at the same time so much variety in the types of burlesque and pinup I saw...and a ton of tattoos 😍. The Asian culture as a whole is so wide-spread and as a fellow POC, it's important that we show our visibility, our individual histories and heritages, and we show our awesome, barrier-breaking, stereotype-ending takes on vintage and how we choose to wear it. Asian culture in general seems so ripe in history, and I loved seeing how different people paid tribute to their backgrounds through their photo shoots and performances. I also saw a lot of alt pinups while I was creating this list, and I finally got to feature a couple of names I'd left out of my Alt Pinup month a couple of years back. This was a really cool experience for me and it was a way to celebrate something that I don't have personal ties to but respect immensely. I love culture and history in general, LOVE learning about different Asian cultures, but I don't want anything I say or do to come off disrespectfully. This was the best way I could come up with that contributes positively to the exposure of fellow POC but doesn't negatively contribute to cultural appropriation or minimizing. So I hope that even though I'm not Asian my creating this post doesn't offend anyone; I promise it wasn't the intention. Not even a little. I've blabbed enough. I hope you enjoyed this post and I'll see you soon!
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