So I decided to take a trip home this weekend to the Bay Area to visit my family and enjoy the comforts of a home-cooked Filipino dinner. Now, a visit home always consists of two things – an outing with some of my hometown friends and hours spent on the couch being forced to watch The Filipino Channel with my mom. Seeing how there’s not much to do in a small town, it’s usually impulse that my friends and I would take a trip to the mall. On a routine visit to one of my favorite department stores, I had exactly what I wanted in my hand at the checkout counter, only to come to the realization – and great disappointment – that I cannot buy anything new for the next ten weeks. To think, that I was already going to fail the challenge after the first week.
When I get back to my parents house, to no surprise, I find the Filipino Channel still on and my mother glued to the television screen. The show playing is the Philippines’ top game show, Wowowee, a low-budget, hour-long program featuring scantily clad women dancing around poor contestants who wait hours in line and doing ridiculous things in front of a studio audience in order to win a couple hundred bucks. The music featured on the game show consists of the newest music trend to hit the country – The Wonder Girls – an all-female group from Korea. The music video for their single, “Nobody,” features the group in a 50s-esque big band musical variety show. Just as Nissen, Leshkowich, and Jones discussed in Re-Orienting Fashion, the video depicts how “variations of Western clothing are the standard fare throughout much of Asia” (5). Thus, the video depicts a giant mash-up of "East meets West," in terms of musical genre, fashion, language – all with the ever-popular vintage appeal.
Jo Anne Lasola
Post #1
Niessen, Sandra, Ann Marie Leshkowich, and Carla Jones, eds. Re-Orienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress. NY: Berg, 2003. Print
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wowowee
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