Designers Daniel Chew and Tin Nguyen Photo: Courtesy of CFGNY

The two are self-taught designers, who watched YouTube videos, solicited friends in the fashion industry for lessons and PDF patterns, and relied on intuition borne from Nguyen’s sculpting background and Chew’s childhood addiction to Internet fashion forums (obsessions included Björk and Comme des Garçons). The clincher, however, came when Nguyen remembered past trips to Vietnam, where his mother would have garments custom-made. “Tailoring is such a thing in Vietnamese culture, and as I started to take more trips to Vietnam as an adult, that’s how we were able to start the project,” he says.

Twice a year Nguyen and Chew fly to Ho Chi Minh City and head straight to Bui Vien, where the city’s street tailors create custom clothes for Westerners, too large to fit into local sizes, or remake designer garments for tourists. CFGNY relies on four of these shops, renting an apartment close by and overseeing the process for a month at a time. One shop might have six craftsmen who specialize in the cut of a dress pant, another might focus on carefully hand-stitching woven grid tops from silk. To make T-shirts, the two zipped across the city on motorbike to visit a counterfeit market and commission their own “authentic bootleg” CFGNY tees. “We’re dealing with fashion and production in a way that’s conceptual,” Nguyen says. “The West has this idea that if something is made in Asia, it’s bad quality, but we’re interested in rewriting this narrative—there is great tailoring in Vietnam.”





1 / 22 Chevron Chevron Photo: David Brandon Geeting / Courtesy of CFGNY

The scope of their project is vast and densely layered. Chew points to their use of unexpected Asian materials: A jacket whose leather was sourced from a motorbike seat producer in the industrial sector of Ho Chih Minh City, bags and pants made from recycled woven plastics that are used to create plant canopies. There are familiar fabrics sourced from local bedding and pajama shops, who stock rolls of ugly dotted florals or popular children’s cartoons. In CFGNY’s hands, they become a baseball shirt covered in Pokémon. “When you think of Asian fabrics, you think of dragons, brocade, silk, however we’re using unconventional materials in weird ways that do come from Vietnam, but don’t read as Asian,” Nguyen says. “Our references are very specific to Asians growing up, but don’t necessarily read Asian to people.” The name Concept Foreign Garments “perfectly encapsulates the ideas,” Chew adds. “It’s more the idea that it’s foreign, even though it might not be. We as Asian-American people can be considered foreign.”

Thus far, they have been supported by pre-orders from the Asian-American arts and fashion community that has happily swelled around them. (“A big dream of ours,” Chew admits, “was to get a big group of gaysians to roll up to the club together, and that’s actually happened.”) The next run will be distributed on their website, as they begin to ramp up production to meet the demand that has rocketed following the 47 Canal show—the collection’s many tongue-in-cheek details (i.e. the Pokémon shirt) have instant social media appeal. That brings us to the brand’s secondary “bootleg” name: Cute Fucking Gay New York, which sums things up nicely.

“We like the ambivalent relationship that cuteness provokes in people—you either want to protect it or destroy it—and playing with that to evoke some type of new desire,” Nguyen says. “Something grotesque, but also beautiful at the same time.”