Splitting the Seams
Splitting the Seams
Transnational Feminism and the Manila-Toronto Production of Filipino Couture
In 2013, Mangosing created VINTA, a small run of designs that are custom fit for consumers, produced by a single master sewer in Manila, and then shipped back to Toronto for distribution. This chapter reads VINTA amid the easy consumption of global Asian and Filipino labor (from fast fashion to the predominance of Filipina/o caregivers in Canada). VINTA works against these patterns by first emphasizing an individualized experience (a custom-made dress) and second, by attempting to work against a system that relies upon low-paid and “deprofessionalized” Filipino laborers. But VINTA is also only made possible because Mangosing outsources the work to the Philippines. She thus sees VINTA as a combination of a capitalist and feminist enterprise, the results of which are an uneasy negotiation of labor and the diaspora, a feminist project that calls attention to the untidy seams of relations between women in the global North and South.
Keywords: fast fashion, custom fit, deprofessionalized, Asian labor, transnational feminism, diaspora, global North, global South, Toronto, Philippines
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