Fashion history is a fertile terrain for encapsulating issues of gender and the body, power and control, commerce and manufacturing, and art and popular culture. This collection of fourteen essays on East Asia ca. 1880s–1960s presents not only the familiar kimono, qipao, and hanbok, but also lesser-known developments in military and school uniforms, religious vestments, ritual garments, accessories, and textile trades. Fashion—whether referring to its neutral synonyms of garments/ clothing/dress or to the embodiments of change and allure—is presented here as a heterogeneous medium to which East Asians widely and repeatedly turned to assert allegiances, influence behaviors, and reshape society. For our purpose, fashion (including clothing, hair, accessories, and fabrics) was not limited to the pursuit of chicness among the moneyed class. Prevalent struggles, such as whether and to what extent Western styles should be adopted, fired up debates on a national, even international, level. Who could wear what was seldom a one-person decision. Modernizers, colonizers, and sovereigns privileged certain fashion practices to their own goals, and others followed. In volatile times, the maintenance of traditional attire and accouterments could represent a form of resistance across the political spectrum, but it could equally be made to serve authoritarianism. Fashion, Identity, and Power in Modern Asia focuses on the transitional states of late Qing to early Republican China, Meiji to Taishō Japan, colonial Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, where imaginations collided.
Asian fashion history has a robust material foundation in the West. Chinese dragon robes, Japanese kimono, and Korean hanbok have long been collected by institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History and the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM, renowned for maritime trade arts) and by mainstream fine arts museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. For a long time, however, items of Asian clothing were largely seen by non-Asians as ethnic costumes, classified under textiles and the decorative arts. In the West, Asian clothing articles were first marketed as curiosities—in Chinatowns, for example. While certain clothing types, such as costumes of the Noh theater, eventually garnered attention as objects of art with complex histories, many Asian historical garments including the kimono first encountered Western viewers at souvenir boutiques or world expositions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In these contexts, the deeper significance of garments as markers of rank, wealth, marital status, metaphysics, cultural nationalism, and so forth tended to be poorly accounted for. More problematic is when museums in the twenty-first century still subject Asian fashion to superficial, Orientalizing readings. It is not uncommon to see kimono being exhibited with Japanese swords and armors, reflecting the parochial fascination with samurai culture. But audiences are becoming more critical. In 2015, controversies rose up around Claude Monet’s 1876 La Japonaise (Camille Monet wearing a blond wig and a bright red kimono), when the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, invited visitors to don a replica kimono and stand in front of the painting to have their pictures taken. This type of presentation reinforces certain Asian stereotypes also seen in movie characterizations such as the kimono-clad assassin O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill (2003), which also features the qipao-clad Sofie Fatale. Fortunately, scholarly research on kimono is increasingly available in English, such as, recently, Anna Jackson’s Kimono: The Art and Evolution of Japanese Fashion (2015) and Terry Satsuki Milhaupt’s Kimono: A Modern History (2014).
In recent years, blockbuster museum exhibitions in honor of Western fashion designers or celebrity wearers at Fine Arts museums have gradually helped to widen the discourse. Inquisitive curators want to tell alternative stories about creativity and agency. A representative recent exhibition was “Georgia O’Keeffe: Art, Image, and Style” at the Peabody Essex Museum where O’Keeffe’s clothing was presented as reflecting her modernist aesthetic and reinforcing the austere public persona she so keenly cultivated.6 The performative aspect of fashion as integral to the larger oeuvre of an artist will also be the theme of a major show on Frida Kahlo at the Victoria and Albert Museum (June–November 2018). While delving into overlooked connections, these exhibitions seek to inscribe new significance to fashion and self-fashioning.
Asian clothing history appears to be on the cusp of similar revisions. In the past decade or so, for example, museums have attempted to re-narrate the history of Chinese textiles from scholarly perspectives. A more notable accomplishment is Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (2008) by Antonia Finnane, who excavates dresses from printed sources from the late Qing dynasty to the Cultural Revolution of the People’s Republic of China. Taking a specific view on “fashion,” Finnane tightens the links between the shifting nature of people’s dress to major sociopolitical events. Similarly emphasizing a sociopolitical framework is Visualizing Beauty: Gender and Ideology in Modern East Asia (2012) edited by Aida Yuen Wong. While focusing on the constructs of “traditional women” and “new women,” essays in that volume draw upon a diverse range of sources such as fashion journals, interior design magazines, newspaper illustrations, and paintings of and by women.
Concepts of beauty and womanhood in changing societies did impact the way women dressed themselves. But in the end, this article seeks to break the artificial boundaries between art history, fashion history, visual cultural studies, economic and political history, and gender studies. Woman’s history has evolved since the fall of the Qing in 1911, the Meiji Restoration (1868–1912), or the fall of the Joseon dynasty and the Korean Empire or the Daehan Empire (1897–1910). The 1910s marked the beginning of women’s suffrage activities in China, while the 1919 March First Movement in colonial Korea had many female supporters. Although modern dress reforms impacted both males and females, their evolution could not be divorced from women’s participation in social reforms.
Dress reform was not a uniquely East Asian phenomenon. Patricia Cunningham has placed new fashions in relation to the promotion of women’s health and their social role in Europe and America at the turn of the twentieth century. Several scholars define dress reform movements in the West in conjunction with women’s suffrage. From the 1850s to the 1890s, women in Victorian England called for liberation from opulent or irrational fashion styles, which continued into the Progress Era in the USA from the 1890s to the 1920s. Social activists proposed a rational design for women’s dress, covering the body comfortably without restricting daily activities. Nonetheless, women’s dresses remained largely decorative and not conducive to active lifestyles. For example, Gayle Fischer demonstrates how women wearing pantaloons were judged rebellious or unconventional. Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818–1894), an advocate of women’s rights and temperance, was associated with the so-called Bloomers, referring to those women who favored loose-fitting trousers instead of a skirt worn with a short jacket.
Emancipation from corsets, crinolines, or bustles was a long and laborious process. Less-restrictive wear was sanctioned for women who worked in the fields, but women like Mary Edwards Walker (1832–1919) were arrested for wearing pants in 1866. Historically, extensive dress reforms tended to go hand-in-hand with forced political changes. The second half of the nineteenth century was a tumultuous time not just for Asia but also for Europe and North America. The Civil War in the USA had just ended in 1865, while Japan entered a new era with the demise of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1868. A little over a decade before, Commodore Matthew Perry’s fleet had appeared off the coast of Tokyo and pressured Japan to open its ports to foreign trade. In 1854, Japan signed a treaty with the USA which allowed trade at two ports. In 1858, another treaty was signed which opened more ports and designated cities in which foreigners could reside. Once foreigners were legally allowed to do business in the archipelago, the closed-door policy of the Tokugawa Shogunate was practically defunct. In the 1870s, the Meiji government pronounced a series of radical reforms including new ceremonial outfits for the imperial family (including the emperor and the empress) and government officials. The Japanese experience was then replicated in Joseon Korea, with Japan now playing the role of a foreign power pressing for modernization, including dress reforms, that tipped the trades to the aggressor’s advantage. Except for those conciliatory toward Japan, the entire process was unsettling for the Joseon people.
A 2014 exhibition held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Treasures from Korea: Arts and Culture of the Joseon Dynasty 1392–1910, brought much interest to the modern dress and European suits of court officials of the Korean Empire. A section titled “The End of a Dynasty” presented clothing, accessories, and photographs of government officials during the Korean Empire. An official’s robe composed of trousers worn with a knee-length jacket symbolized the regime’s ambition to be an equal partner in diplomacy with modernized countries. Paintings and photographs of figures garbed in traditional and modernized styles in this exhibition drew attention to the schizophrenic process of modernization. In Korea, sumptuous period films and dramas have made historic clothing much more familiar to ordinary citizens than a generation ago. The 2016 movie Last Princess (Deokhye-ongiu 덕혜옹주 德惠翁主) makes explicit the political meaning of clothing when the Joseon princess expresses her nationalism by occasionally defying dress orders by her “hosts” in Japan who force her to move there at age thirteen, and when she finally returns to Korea in old age, she proudly puts on the hanbok.
Kyeongmi Joo and Kyunghee Pyun observe that urban Korean men were quick to adopt Western suits, walking canes, and wrist watches, while Korean women were able to hold on to traditional styles. k. PYun And A. Y. wong Dress reforms in Korea focused on the adoption of Westernized clothing in the public sphere, leaving women in the private realm largely unaffected, despite rising interests in girls’ public education. Joo stresses a binary view on Westernized accessories: men in public space were encouraged or required to adopt them while accessories worn by women were often considered a sign of vanity or luxury. In Pyun’s essay, it is argued that woven woolen fabrics were mostly for menswear in Asia and remained accessible only to the social elite even after World War II.
The Gapsin Coup in 1884 and the Gabo Reform in 1894–1896 were two events with widespread implications for Korean fashion attitudes. As reform-minded elites took sides with Japan or Russia, their modernized attire was looked at with suspicion; as new fashion trends became tied to conspicuous consumption and luxurious Japanese manufacturing and imports, oppositions to dress modernization were touted as anti-colonial nationalism. Yet, the proliferation of sites of modernity during the interwar period—restaurants, cafes, theaters, beer halls, department stores, etc.—meant that there were increasing opportunities for people to show off their Western suits and high-heeled shoes. Local or distant travels which allowed people to compare their cultures with foreign ones also helped to reduce the stigma of looking modern. Likewise, in Japan, the creation of modern spaces such as department stores and public parks made more visible what fellow citizens wore. Less expected was the similar role played by post offices, telegram booths, hospitals, and schools. Across East Asia, advertisements in newspapers and magazines and posters in stores drove consumer desires centered around ever-shifting fashion. In actuality, fashion was never unified, and people dressed themselves with different degrees of newness.
Many so-called Japanese traditions in Meiji to Taishō Japan (ca. 1910s–1930s) were inflected with invention and innovation. As Japanese houses were remodeled with modern kitchens and dining tables designed for intimate family gatherings in major cities, the nostalgia for a native place or indigenous hometown in places marginalized by urbanization and industrialization, or the development of a women’s workforce such as café waitresses or factory workers exemplified this trend. In modern China, the cheongsam or qipao is the bestknown type of “traditional” clothing, though strictly speaking, it was a twentieth-century invention with dubious beginnings in the Qing “banner” or qi gowns. By the 1920s–1930s, modern dresses such as the qipao became dominant in Asian print culture, notably advertisements and newspaper illustrations produced in urban centers such as Shanghai and Tokyo.
Known as “the Paris of the East,” Shanghai gained the particular reputation as a cosmopolitan playground for the glamorous and the stylish. In 1937, the city had about three million inhabitants. European, American, or Russian residents totaled only around 35,000–50,000, but this foreign minority exerted great economic power in trade and finance. Cinema, animation, and popular music were all flourishing in Shanghai. Socialites in Shanghai dressed themselves in modern style for dance parties and banquets. However, a great many Chinese still adhered to traditional dress codes. The majority of ordinary citizens and women at home only slightly modified their fashion and occasionally updated their looks with accessories. Therefore, dress reform was not practiced everywhere or consistently.
In 2000, Hazel Clark published a whole book, albeit a short one, on the cheongsam—a type of body-hugging sheath dress with a mandarin collar and Chinese flower buttons. She discusses aspects of manufacture, design, and style, but does not go into how this iconic dress was used in different parts of the Sinophone world, such as Taiwan and Hong Kong. Even a single garment type meant different things to different people. As Ng points out, the cheongsam in Hong Kong’s popular culture as filtered through the Orientalizing Hollywood could simultaneously represent the morally good and the decadent. This paradox continues to have resonance in present-day Hong Kong and contemporary fashion. Chinese fashion history is gaining wider attention. Books such as Juanjuan Wu’s Chinese Fashion from Mao to Now (2009). The Chinese Fashion Industry: An Ethnographic Approach (2013), and Christine Tsui’s China Fashion: Conversations with Designers (2010) shed new light on the complex historical forces that have re-oriented the fashion industry. These are concerned mainly with contemporary trends.