Tonight from 7 pm – 9:30 pm at the Museum of Chinese in America, Director of Parsons’ MA Fashion Studies program, Christina Moon, will be moderating a lecture discussing the fashion industry.

The lecture, Female, Fashionable, New York, features Mary Ping (Slow and Steady Wins the Race), Jade Lai (Creatures of Comfort), and Cynthia Leung (Balenciaga).

From the Museum of Chinese in America:

Being an Asian American woman in the fashion industry in New York can at times be one of the most glamorous roles one can embody. What is less seen is the daily struggle to survive one of the most competitive cut-throat fields in the world. MOCA brings together three women in the fashion industry from different perspectives to explore the behind the scenes of their worlds and how they intersect.

Mary Ping: Mary Ping received a B.A. in Art from Vassar College in 2000. With little formal training, she launched her eponymous label one year later after work experiences with Anna Sui and The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum. In 2002, she started Slow and Steady Wins the Race, a design label now widely recognized for its sartorial wit and anthropological response to fashion. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Museum at F.I.T., the Museum at R.I.S.D. , and was included in the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibit ‘New York Fashion Now’ in London. In 2007, Ping was inducted into the CFDA, Council of Fashion Designer of America.

Jade Lai: Growing up in Hong Kong, earning her boutique wings in Los Angeles, and making her second home in New York, Jade Lai is one worldly woman, and it shows. In her beautiful, bicoastal shop — Creatures of Comfort — clothing, accessories, and home goods are all imbued with the sophistication and humor of the your most well-traveled friends — that is to say, go-with-anything printed trousers and well-fitting cozy knits rather than hemp cargos and bandannas. Her own in-house line, also named Creatures of Comfort, is a distillation of Lai’s style DNA — cozy, witty, cosmopolitan, and “a bit off” (in the best of ways), and her aesthetic is one that’s completely in tune with the modern woman. We caught up with the style star outside her shop on NYC’s Mulberry Street to talk travel, influences, and her four favorite outfits she’s stocking right now.

Cynthia Leung: Cynthia Leung has worked in fashion as both journalist and PR. She is currently the New York PR for Balenciaga and has worked with fashion clients such as Mary Ping/SSWTR, Patrik Ervell, Dior Homme and Rodarte. She has served as PR for the auction house Phillps de Pury and handled the press for Helmut Lang’s first exhibition as a contemporary artist. As a journalist she has written on fashion and art for 032c, Pin-UP, V, L’Uomo Vogue and the South China Morning Post. Her last essay appears in the Opening Ceremony 10th Anniversary book, documenting the pre-history of the company.

Christina Moon: Dr. Christina H. Moon is an Assistant Professor in the School of Art and Design History and Theory and the Director of the MA Fashion Studies program at Parsons the New School for Design. Her background training is in Socio-Cultural Anthropology and American Studies, having received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2011. Her research explores the social ties and intimate cultural encounters between fashion design worlds and manufacturing landscapes across Asia and the Americas, specifically exploring the memory, migration, and labor of its cultural workers. Dr. Moon writes on fashion, globalization and its intersection with ethnicity, race, and migration; design and material culture; social memory and narrative. She is the recipient of grants from the Wenner-Gren, Kauffman, Fulbright, and Korea Foundations, which has funded her ethnographic fieldwork across New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Seoul. She is currently working on a book project with photographer Lauren Lancaster on the fast-fashion clothing industry in Los Angeles.

RSVP required to programs@mocanyc.org

For more information about the event, please visit the Museum of Chinese in America’s event page.