Out in Style

Unlike some suburban malls that are empty on Saturday night, the Asian Garden Mall in Westminster stays packed throughout the evening. The only indoor shopping center in Little Saigon, it attracts members of the Vietnamese community, young and old, rich and poor. And even though the dress code is anything but rigid, style matters.

One recent night the parade of people included businessmen in well-tailored Western suits and women in aodai, the traditional, floor-length formal Vietnamese dress. It turned out that virtually all these people were wedding guests headed for Dynasty, a restaurant on the mall’s second floor.

Most others, there simply to shop, eat or socialize, modeled their dress after the Europeans. “The formal Vietnamese costumes are reserved for family celebrations,” explained Diane Vo, a business law student at a nearby university. “The rest of the time, we prefer a Westernized look.”

She added that they must balance their love of fancy clothes and jewelry--as evidenced by the lively trade in the mall’s jewelry mart--with harsh contemporary realities. Gang-related crime, a local problem, has caused some people to dress down over the past several years.

Recently, the mall built up its security, and shoppers now seem to feel safer about indulging their yen for fashion. As in most cultures, this is most evident in the college-age crowd.

Ordinary Western clothes can look surprisingly exotic when the fashion plates who frequent the mall put their mind to it. One young man used accessories to set himself apart. He wore polished black pointed shoes and two tiny gold hoops in his ear.

Another, cosmetologist Long Nguyen, put a typical Western shirt and pants together for what looked at first like a Space Age jumpsuit. Actually it was an Italian-made shirt and pants, each in an unusual pea-green color. When asked where he bought them he smiled proudly.

“From Politix,” he said, referring to the contemporary men’s boutique in Newport Beach’s Fashion Island.