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American graphics have colonized the wardrobes of the world with the chunkily rendered names of New York boroughs, and the logos of baseball teams and colleges. But what if you're Asian and don't want to wear a hooded top that says BRONX or 49ERS? For you, there is a new cluster of regional designers sporting homegrown credentials on their fitted cotton sleeves.

Take Jowee Alviar, 31, and Raymund Punzalan, 31, of Team Manila. The duo elevates the Philippine capital's "beautiful chaos," as Alviar puts it, by emblazoning it onto hip tees. Thus images of cockfights appear alongside local icons like jeepneys. "We always see CALIFORNIA or NEW YORK T shirts," says Alviar. "[We thought] why not a Manila shirt instead?"

Kuala Lumpur's Azizul Abdul Latif, 31, and Izham Fazely, 25, felt similarly when, two years ago, they established PopMalaya. As Latif tells it, they were tired of clothing designs "ripped off" from the U.S., Europe and Japan. So they created their own, melding Jawi, the country's adapted Arabic script, with images of Bas Mini (KL's minibus service) and Tunku Abdul Rahman, the revered father of independence. "We hope that through our designs, people will start to become more observant of themselves and realize that our local culture is rich and colorful in its own right," Latif says.

A forerunner for brands like PopMalaya and Team Manila can be found in Hong Kong's G.O.D. This fashion and homeware label — the initials are a homonym of the Cantonese phrase "live better" — was founded in 1996. From the beginning, G.O.D. took images of proletarian Hong Kong — tenement frontages, old movie posters — and applied them to clothes and accessories, articulating a prototypical Hong Kong identity just as the city was in the throes of decolonization. "Fashion and dress [have] always been part and parcel of social change," says Yeoh Seng Guan, a communications professor at Monash University Malaysia, "both in terms of reflecting and inciting it."

In Thailand, which has not experienced colonization, designers are less hung up on identity. "If we use elements of local culture, it's not so much a way of expressing 'Thai-ness' but more about placing things found around us that might be funny or surprising," says Pijitra Lalitasakun, who turned Hanuman, the monkey god from Hindu epic the Ramayana, into a motif that adorns items by Bangkok's Hey Pilgrim! label. The 28-year-old says that if Bangkok has identity issues they are not cultural but to do with market perception — it is seen as "the place where you buy silk and cheap wholesale." She would like it to be "a true player on the fashion front" instead.

For the most part, though, designers display a staunch regional aesthetic. "The prevalence of capitalist consumer culture from the West has meant that there's a move toward a regional identity," says Daniel Vukovich, a lecturer in postcolonial theory at the University of Hong Kong.

Helen Lee, 32, who co-founded Shanghai label insh in 2006, is in the vanguard. Her designs mix ancient and modern symbols in a way that is "communicating a culture," she explains. It is faintly ironic that one of Lee's best-selling shirts, which reads I LOVE SHANGHAI, simply appropriates the 1977 Milton Glaser logo for New York State. But none of this is about a dislike of America, per se. Just the desire to replace America's icons with Asia's own.

• Lara Day
• streetwear designers, T-Shirts, clothing designs, Asia, icons, symbols, logos