1930s Filipinos Were Hip to American Style. There Was Backlash.

In 1938, the Los Angeles Times writer Maddin Malone described a trend he’d noticed on the streets of the West Coast metropolis: “the little brown men from the Philippines [sic] are two or three years ahead of the styles and the well dressed American in a few seasons will be wearing what they are wearing down in Los Angeles and Main streets now.”

And Malone wasn’t the only one to think so. As American Studies scholar Denise Khor writes, in the 1930s and 1940s, Filipinos, including those who spent their days laboring in farm fields, were widely known for their sharp sense of style. Read more at JStor.