East Meets West : In Little Saigon, Tradition Is What You Make It

Vietnamese seamstresses and designers plying their trade in Orange County’s Little Saigon are weaving their cultural heritage with western influences to create new styles that seamlessly blend the east and west.

Hand-painted silk dresses, kimonos, peasant jackets, velvet slippers and jewelry can be found at Little Saigon, where 3,000 Vietnamese-owned and operated businesses populate parts of Westminster and Garden Grove.

Nowhere is the influence of the East more apparent than in a modest tailoring shop called Thiet-Lap Inc. in Garden Grove.

Thiet-Lap designs, hand-sews and sells the traditional Vietnamese form-fitting dresses called ao dai (pronounced “ow yai”). These are made of hand-painted silks and velvets and fall below the knees; they are slit to the waist to reveal flowing pants underneath.

Thiet-Lap designer Nina Tran-Leminh, 27, creates both the traditional ao dai and her own designs, also sold in the shop, that have a distinctly Western flavor.

Tran-Leminh is a Vietnamese native who came to the United States in 1982 and studied fashion design at Brooks College in Long Beach.

She improvises on the basic ao dai pattern using Western techniques. In place of the traditional mandarin collar, she designs open necklines with square, V or rounded shapes. Instead of the traditional raglan sleeves, many of her designs will have puffy inset sleeves and even shoulder pads.

One of her most unusual creations is a white silk ao dai with a mandarin collar--but that has a cut-out front attached to the collar with strands of iridescent beads.

“It’s new,” she says proudly. “Nobody’s done anything like it.”

One of Tran-Leminh’s styles, appropriate for a black-tie affair, is an ao dai made entirely of see-through black chiffon worn over a hot pink satin strapless gown.

The ao dai dresses are priced from $100 to $500, depending on the fabric and work involved. Some are made of silks hand-painted by local Vietnamese artists.

Vietnamese wear these to weddings, church and other family gatherings. For her own wedding last month, Tran-Leminh changed into five different ao dai dresses of her own design.

Her brother, Hoang Tran, who also works at Thiet-Lap, hopes his sister’s modern ao dai designs will encourage young women to wear the dresses more often.

“They need something up to date,” Tran says. “The traditional dresses are very form-fitting, so it’s not easy to move around. It has to do with the tradition in Vietnam that most of the time women were supposed to be quiet and still.”

For her fall collection, New York designer Cynthia Rowley created an Asian-style dress similar to those at Thiet-Lap. Like the Vietnamese dresses, Rowley’s red silk dress fits snugly and has a mandarin collar and a slit up the thigh--but no flowing pants.

Rowley says her creation was inspired by her grandmother, who was Italian.

“In the ‘50s and ‘60s, my grandmother would buy authentic Chinese dresses and wear them,” she says.

Rowley admires those styles for “the femininity of the silhouette, the long, narrow shapes that fit close to the body, and the rich colors of the Oriental silks. They’re so vivid--especially the reds.”

Such sentiments give people such as Tran hope that his shop will achieve the kind of acclaim in the United States that the family’s original store enjoyed in Vietnam.

His parents opened the shop in Saigon in 1950; they eventually became the country’s most prominent tailors, making dresses for Vietnamese actresses and the wives of state officials. The family opened the Garden Grove store in 1983.

“We have a hard time keeping up with demand” in the United States, Tran says. “Many of the older generation want the ao dai dress because they feel better in traditional dress than Western clothes. Also, people still marry in the dress. That’s why demand is there. But they’re not in the mainstream yet.”

Several fabric stores carry the opulent embroidered silks and hand-painted velvets, which can be turned over to one of the mall’s custom tailors to be made into evening wear. Kim Son Fabrics, for instance, has fine silks for $9.50 a yard.

Tucked away among the various novelty shops are velvet peasant jackets with Chinese prints for $50, and velvet slippers and mules embellished with sequins and beading for about $15 a pair--all of which can accent a wardrobe.