Twenty-first-century Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) is the centre of style for a growing urban middle class in post-reform Vietnam. Over the past generation, since macro-economic reform (đổi mới), and with increased opportunities for business, education and travel, urbanites have been able to climb the social ladder and wield new forms of social power stemming from emerging lifestyle and consumption practices. Middle-class lifestyles have become the most desired models for living, providing an opportunity for the government to rely on the urban lifestyle media to convey its point of view to a receptive public. Engaging with Vietnam's urban lifestyle media, this article argues that the impact of reform in Vietnam has been overstated. Popular women's magazines reveal that continuities remain in the mode and content of the delivery of the state's values in the socialist past and the market-oriented present, even with the evolution of a modern mass media system.
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