This black baseball cap with dragon motifs belongs to Tiffany Le, a Montreal-based artist and first-generation Chinese Canadian who immigrated to Canada at five. It features two dragons on each side of the cap, surrounding a central character that reads “dragon” in Chinese. The cap shows that twenty-first-century Chinese Canada women’s fashion can offer critiques of Western fashion appropriating Chinese culture. Incorporating Chinese motifs into mass-produced clothes and accessories also calls attention to issues such as the use of labour, consumerism and representation. Compared to the earlier generations, millennial Chinese Canadian women rarely wear traditional Chinese clothes. Their adoption of “world fashion” that combines Western and Chinese design elements do not emphasize their ethnic differences. Instead, it creates more ambiguity and space for interpretation, showing that these women are open to cross-cultural communication and exchange.
