CHRISTINA MOON is Assistant Professor in the School of Art and Design History and Theory and the Director of the MA in Fashion Studies at Parsons The New School for Design. She received her doctoral degree in Anthropology from Yale. Her research looks at the social ties and cultural encounters between fashion design worlds and manufacturing landscapes across Asia and the Americas, exploring the memory, migration, and labor of its cultural workers, and ways of knowing and representing in ethnographic practice.

Over the past two years, along with the photographer Lauren Lancaster, Christina has been working with hundreds of Korean families in Los Angeles who have, over the last decade, transformed the city’s garment district into the central hub for fast fashion in the Americas. These families make their living by designing clothes, organizing the factory labor to cut and sew them in places like China and Vietnam, and selling them wholesale to retailers in the U.S., including Forever 21, Urban Outfitters, T.J. Maxx, and Nordstrom. With additional fieldwork in Los Angeles among the Korean and Mexican design and manufacturing communities, Christina will also explore how diasporic trade ties span global expanses in the design, creation, and dissemination of fast-fashion clothing in Mexico City and Guangzhou, telling the story of the global encounters and shifting relationships that have dramatically transformed clothing and the global fashion industry.