Kyunghee Pyun and Aida Yuen Wong, eds, Fashion, Identity and Power in Modern Asia

Abstract

In an era of rapid social transformation, technological change and imperialism, choices of dress and consumption took on deeply political significance. The political dimensions of clothing, deployed in the service of authoritarian nation-building, defiance, emancipatory movements and the navigation of changing social norms, are at the heart of this volume on East Asian fashion history. Seeking to go beyond objectifying, museum-centric approaches, its essays highlight the intersections of dress history with ‘issues of gender and the body, power and control, commerce and manufacturing and art and popular culture’ (p. 1). As such, it is a welcome addition to the growing literature that takes seriously the diversity and agency of modernising consumption patterns in regions other than the West. Comprising fourteen essays on Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese and Hong Kong dress history over c. 1880–1960, the project collectively aspires to present a ‘broader transcultural perspective’ (p. 3), highlighting elements of common experience and interconnection across the region. While many individual contributions do remain limited to national frameworks and courtly or elite subjects, the editors have ordered the chapters carefully so as to bring them into productive dialogue with one another and generate a genuine sense of development across the region as a whole. The best essays are those that deploy histories of particular objects, movements or styles to complicate teleologies of national modernisation, highlighting the alternate visions of social order and modernity that became expressed through dress, and the localised ambivalence often generated by the new possibilities of globalised consumption. The volume is further enriched by a wide, often creative array of sources and approaches. This is exemplified by Rachel Silberstein and Seiko Sugimoto in Chapters 10 and 11, which combine statistical, historical and even popular literary sources with visual analysis of pictures and dress to construct a compelling picture of woollen cloths’ historical importance in China and Japan. The best sections of the book in fact might offer useful methodological inspiration for further studies in this field. The book is divided into four thematic sections. The first, ‘Garments and Uniform’, considers state impositions of modernised official costume. The three essays by Yoshinori Osakebe, Kyungmee Lee and Aida Yuen Wong, which focus on official dress reforms in Japan, Korea and China respectively, work particularly well together, showing both the common kinds of opposition these measures encountered and the degree to which these three countries were a constant reference point to each other as they sought to reinvent themselves. Osakebe shows how Westernising Meiji dress codes, far from finding easy acceptance, became an emotive proxy for the competing political visions of factions of old nobility and a rising bureaucratic cadre. Lee and Wong meanwhile highlight the challenges of Korean and Chinese reformers negotiating the twin forks of European and Japanese imperialism, as well as the symbolic weight of Sinocentric Confucian heritage. Textile History, 51 (1), May 2020