329,000 fashion outworkers<\/a> recorded in 1995.<\/p>\nAccording to Emma Do and Kim Lam’s graphic novel, May \u1edf Nh\u00e0 (Working from Home), a book documenting the experiences of Vietnamese outworkers in Australia, Asian migrants were the backbone of Australia’s garment industry at the time.<\/p>\n
While some outworkers had been seamstresses in Vietnam, prior experience was not necessary and working from home meant they could continue looking after their children.<\/p>\n
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The barriers to entry for women to become garment industry outworkers were low. (ABC News)<\/p>\n
Underpaid and mistreated, many were ashamed of their jobs and their children embarrassed, said Do.<\/p>\n
“It’s a stark contrast to the way that we’re celebrating Vietnamese fashion designers now,” she said.<\/p>\n
In recent years, Vietnam has gained a reputation as a fashion leader, with Western travellers flocking to Ho Chi Minh City for shopping trips.<\/p>\n
“There’s a real sense of pride in being made in Vietnam, made by Vietnamese people,” Do said.<\/p>\n
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Reclaiming history of survival<\/p>\n
As Vietnam’s fashion industry burgeons, young Vietnamese creatives in Australia such as Ms Doan have been energised by its momentum.<\/p>\n
Through community-driven fashion pop-up stores that showcase local Vietnamese labels, they are reclaiming a history of survival labour and celebrating their forebears’ legacy of craftsmanship.<\/p>\n
Born in Darwin, Ms Doan returned to Ho Chi Minh City as a child before settling in Melbourne in 2016. Living between two countries, she said, often felt like being “suspended between two worlds”.<\/p>\n
Although she had departed Vietnam, the cacophony of Vietnamese voices at communal markets and her family’s home cooking remained anchors she would always be moored to.<\/p>\n
Reflecting on her subsequent visits back to Ho Chi Minh, she said: “I saw the country they had left, not frozen in trauma, but alive, creative, and constantly reinventing itself.”<\/p>\n
“I found my own connection to the youth, the fashion, the energy of a generation rewriting what it means to be Vietnamese,” she said.<\/p>\n
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Kieu co-owners Minh Nguyen and Jennifer Ki\u1ec1u Anh Doan reconnected in Ho Chi Minh City. (ABC News: Jarrod Fankhauser)<\/p>\n
During one of her trips in 2024, Ms Doan reunited with an acquaintance from Australia, Minh Nguyen, who she had first connected with at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology’s Asian Association over a mutual craving for specific Vietnamese dishes.<\/p>\n
Sitting by a river in Ho Chi Minh City, Ms Nguyen shared her experience of living between Vietnam and Australia.<\/p>\n
Bonding over their parallel lives and yearning for connection to their motherland, the pair cemented a friendship and ignited a desire to create a community reminiscent of those in their homeland.<\/p>\n
Fashion would soon become the bridge between their divorced worlds, and the conduit to building a community for Melbourne’s “Vi\u1ec7t Ki\u1ec1u”: Vietnamese people and their descendants living overseas.<\/p>\n
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The Kieu pop-up store in North Fitzroy was open during December. (ABC News: Claudia Goundar)<\/p>\n
Ms Doan and Ms Nguyen launched KI\u1ec0U Store together in 2024.<\/p>\n
But fashion is in some ways incidental to the Vi\u1ec7t Ki\u1ec1u experience; at their pop-up stores in Melbourne, a quintessential Vietnamese street sign, alongside servings of traditional iced coffee and homemade street food dishes, are reminders of a faraway place, sparking conversations between strangers about Vietnamese heritage and migration.<\/p>\n
“It’s my way of reconnecting with the culture I love, honouring the generations before me, and creating a space where other Vi\u1ec7t Ki\u1ec1u can see themselves reflected with pride,” she said.<\/p>\n
Revival of Vietnam’s fashion industry<\/p>\n
Vietnam’s fashion industry began to revive after the war when economic reforms invited trade opportunities, leading to the establishment of garment factories in the late 1980s.<\/p>\n
By the early 2000s, a growing middle class spurred a shift toward homegrown fashion and design talent.<\/p>\n
Ms Doan attributes Vietnam’s recent global fashion acclaim to designers’ bold sense of “fearlessness”, a trait she sees as inherited from ancestors’ wartime resilience, and one that drives experimental silhouettes and boundary-pushing designs.<\/p>\n
![\"Two](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/af43ed8042695f04fadb2b95f2321e29.jpeg\")
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A growing middle class spurred a shift toward homegrown fashion in Vietnam. (ABC News: Jarrod Fankhauser)<\/p>\n
“Modern Vietnamese fashion is a reflection of how Vietnam’s been able to reinvent itself so much after the war,” she said.<\/p>\n
Traditional dress such as the \u00e1o d\u00e0i has been re-imagined with exaggerated silhouettes, side slits and unconventional fabrics, Do said.<\/p>\n
She said older generations often viewed these designs as extreme departures from the conservative fit, but “there needs to be that tension between generations, that’s how you push culture forward”.<\/p>\n
There was also a tendency to perceive Asia more as a fast-fashion machine than a place where creativity thrives, she said.<\/p>\n
Loading Instagram content<\/p>\n
Do said Vi\u1ec7t Ki\u1ec1u fashion pop-ups such as KI\u1ec0U Store and Sydney-based Som Space were challenging this notion by foregrounding Vietnamese designers as creative innovators.<\/p>\n
Vietnamese fashion pop-ups, she said, “make me feel like the Vietnamese culture is alive and I’m part of it”.<\/p>\n
“It’s not just something that I’ve inherited through my family, but that I can have these ongoing connections through people,” she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jennifer Ki\u1ec1u Anh Doan’s interest in fashion was inherited from her mother, \u0110\u1ea1i Nguyen, whose work in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":429488,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64,63,134,84888,225088,225091,183837,225089,225090,5611,225092,225093],"class_list":["post-429487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-fashion-industry","tag-jennifer-kieu-anh-doan","tag-kieu","tag-migrant-workers","tag-outsource","tag-outworkers","tag-vietnam","tag-vietnamese-fashion","tag-vietnamese-migrant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=429487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429487\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/429488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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