Born into art — couture on one side, cinema on the other
Most light-up clothing is made in a factory by people who have never set foot in a fashion house. Neon Cowboys is different, and the reason is its founder’s family. Asia Hall grew up inside American high fashion and Hollywood film at the same time.
Her father is Kevan Hall, the acclaimed couturier who built his own luxury fashion house and, earlier, revived the legendary house of Halston as its creative director — dressing Celine Dion, Sharon Stone and Salma Hayek for the red carpet. Asia spent her childhood front-row at New York Fashion Week, a little Black and Chinese girl in a world where almost no one looked like her family, absorbing a couturier’s eye for silhouette, fit and finish.
On the other side of her family are two of the most respected names in Black American cinema: her aunt Kasi Lemmons — the director of Eve’s Bayou, Harriet and the Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance with Somebody — and her uncle Vondie Curtis-Hall, the actor and director known for Chicago Hope, Marvel’s Daredevil and the cult film Gridlock’d. Storytelling, spectacle and the art of making people feel something on a stage or a screen — that was the dinner-table conversation.
The invention that started a fashion house
Asia took a different path from the rest of her family and studied computer science. That collision — couture instinct from one side, engineering from the other — is the entire reason Neon Cowboys exists. Her first creation was the LED cowboy hat, so original that she holds the U.S. utility patent on it. It is why the brand can say something almost no light-up label can: we are the original, and we have the paperwork to prove it. The cheap copies you see floating around are exactly that — copies.
Why it’s luxury fashion, not a costume
Neon Cowboys pieces cost many times what a mass-produced light-up toy costs, and that is by design. A cheap LED product is a disposable novelty — thin fabric, glued-on lights, built to survive one night. A Neon Cowboys piece is luxury fashion that happens to light up: designed with a couturier’s eye, made from real garment materials, with patented lighting engineered into the design rather than stuck on top. It is built to be photographed, re-worn and remembered — the difference between a costume and a wardrobe investment. When you wear a piece like the LED fringe sequin dress or the programmable LED harness, you are wearing the work of a fashion house raised inside high couture.
Twelve years, performers, headliners — and you
For over a decade, Neon Cowboys has dressed go-go and atmosphere performers, flow artists, festival headliners and a few faces you would recognize — right alongside thousands of festival-goers who simply wanted to be the brightest one in the room. Asia was nominated for Forbes 30 Under 30 and walked the conference at 29. The brand has earned thousands of reviews the only way you can: by making things people genuinely love to wear, year after year.
That is the story behind the glow. Read more about Neon Cowboys and our founder →
