07/15/2019
History of Paris Fashion Alterations
When June Mang was born in Vietnam in 1959, the French colonists had already been ousted from the Indochina Nation. But even today in her small shop in Norcross, the 45 year-old Master Taylor says she feels the influence that nearly 100 Years of French rule had upon her native country.
It's in the flare up her dress designs, and the intricacy of every stitch. It's even in evidence in this sign out front Paris Fashion.
Mang, whose parents were Chinese immigrants to Vietnam, begin sewing as a schoolgirl or former capital of then-South Vietnam. “I learned through the school the basic patterns and design,” she says of that time in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. “In my country all women went to school and learned the sewing Basics. The hard stuff I just learned for myself.
from high school, she went on to study at a fashion institute. By that time, the French troops had been replaced by the US forces battling North Vietnam regulars and the Viet Cong guerrillas. But following the evacuation of the last US military personnel in 1975, the end of the war and reunification of North and South Vietnam, the late 1970s were hard times. The little work Mang could find was taking in sewing at home, she says.
In 1978, fearing a Chinese invasion, the Vietnamese government began seizing the assets of the Chinese within its borders, sending thousands of them to indoctrination camps and provoking tens of thousands to flee the country.
By 1979, Mang and two of her sisters decided to leave, paying for passage on a rickety wooden fishing boat. They Joined the so-called “boat people,” the nearly 2 million largely ethnic Chinese from Vietnam who escaped by sailing across the South China Sea.
Mang says she and the 200 others packed into the boat were lucky. Unseaworthy vessels, piracy and disease claimed the lives of many others, but “ we floated to freedom” without incident, she says. “it was scary.... We just sat very tight. We had very little water, food.”
After five nights in more than 500 miles at Sea, the boat landed in Indonesia, where Mang spent a year in a refugee camp. The Episcopal Church sponsored her journey to Atlanta in late 1980.
When she arrived, she knew she had one highly marketable skills that require little English - sewing. She found work at a Dunwoody alteration shop, handling simple hems and repairs. “Then [the shop owner] saw what I could do, “ she says. And she began designing and custom making clothing. By 1985 she had opened her own shop.
Today, Mang, married in the mother of two college-age sons, employees 3 seamstress. About half of her business is alterations, handled by her employees ; the other half is custom work. she has worked on pageant gowns for several Miss USA contestants, and around this time each bring she concentrates on one of the most American of traditions, the High School prom. From a pencil sketch on a sheet of lined notebook paper brought to her by teenage girl, she has crafted a confection in chiffon. she holds up another prom gown, a pink wisp of a dress, and giggles. “It’s a funky thing, “ she says.
One of her specialties is ethnic dress - an ao dai woman’s pantsuit in the Vietnamese style, a madarin-style cheongsam dress from china, a man’s dashiki from Africa, a Japanese kimono.
But in the end, she says, the origin of the fashion is not important to her. “It doesn’t matter what kind of style you want,” Mang says. “You bring the sample or the picture, and I can make it.”
