Organizer and Chair: Ann Marie Leshkowich, Harvard University
Discussant: Penelope Van Esterik, York University
Amidst rapid cultural and economic globalization, South and Southeast Asian women are using fashion to construct and challenge visions of modernity, nationalism, internationalism, and gender. This panel explores how specific Indonesian, Vietnamese, and diasporic South Asian women consciously draw on international styles to craft clothing items as markers of various identities and as commodities whose development, circulation, and use can offer social and economic advantage.
Sandra Niessen’s paper examines how female Batak weavers in North Sumatra adapt pattern innovations in an attempt to reconcile their history with their future. Carla Jones analyzes how middle class women enrolled in manners and wardrobe classes in Yogyakarta transform international styles for proper "Indonesian women." Ann Marie Leshkowich’s paper examines how female merchants draw on diasporic kin to reinterpret Vietnam’s traditional costume as an amalgam of national heritage and international style. Parminder Bhachu explores how British South Asian female entrepreneurs use their multi-national identities and networks to develop a hybrid style with "couture" appeal. Discussant Penny van Esterik brings to the panel an extensive background of scholarship in gender, development, and material culture in Southeast Asia.
These papers suggest two ways in which fashion has become transnational: first, through the concrete circulation of items, ideas, and individuals within diaspora; second, through incorporating these styles into local products which tangibly represent an envisioned relationship to a global community. By focusing on the agency and intentions of individual designers, sellers, and consumers, the panel hopes to spark inter-area discussion of the processes shaping fashion’s meanings and uses.
How Batak Weavers Realize the Challenge of Designing a Future with Thread
Sandra Niessen, University of Alberta
Weaving has traditionally been one of the most powerful forms of women’s expression in Batak society (North Sumatra, Indonesia). Through the manipulation of yarn, women have been able to express their understanding of their society and display these understandings as the identities the cloths convey about their wearers. This paper offers a review of some of the identity selections Batak women have made during times of social turbulence and change, and how these selections have been expressed technically at the loom. As social aspirations have increasingly compelled present-day Bataks to follow fashion dynamics external to their society, the status of Batak weavers, reminiscent of a past age, has declined. The more radical changes which are woven into the Batak textile repertory during the past half century are attempts by weavers to reconcile their history with their future. Supplementary weft patterning characteristic of more high-status Malay textiles has taken precedence over Batak ikat patterns, for instance. Some expressions of change, such as an increased division of textile labour, are not figurative, but symptomatic of the impact of new roads and means of transportation and trade, new economic constraints, new technologies, and shifting centres of power, all of which have profoundly influenced both the producers and the consumers of Batak cloth.
Saving Face: The Economy of Femininity in a Central Javanese City
Carla Jones, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
In the decade prior to the recent Asian economic crisis, a small industry of instructional femininity courses flourished in many Indonesian cities. These courses were modeled on early 20th-century American courses in etiquette and femininity for women. In this paper, I will argue that one such course in Yogyakarta, in 1997, was consciously used by its participants as a tool for altering one’s personality and class identity, through modifying one’s outward appearance and behavior. Goals for most participants included career and social advancement. Particular emphasis was placed on appropriating fashions and personal skills from "expert" sources (such as foreign magazines and local fashion designers) in ways correct with what was considered "Indonesian" and feminine. I will describe how the participants received and sometimes explicitly altered what was taught to them, in order to create what they felt was appropriate and affordable within their financial limitations. Analytically, this paper will therefore address conflicting and ambivalent notions of class, modernity, and national identity. It will follow theories which argue that appearance choices are more than simple attributes of gender subjectivity but are constitutive of it (e.g., Butler 1990, Kondo 1997).
Big Families in a Small World: How Female Entrepreneurs Use International Kin Networks to Shape Vietnam’s National Costume
Ann Marie Leshkowich, Harvard University
While economic and cultural globalization can threaten local producers and traditions, this paper suggests that it can also create opportunities for female entrepreneurs. Specifically, I examine how female designers and sellers of áo dài in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam use knowledge acquired through diasporic kin networks to craft and promote a garment which symbolizes both national tradition and international modernity.
In September 1995, the Miss International Pageant in Tokyo awarded Miss Vietnam "Best National Costume" for her blue and white brocade áo dài—a long, close-fitting tunic worn over loose pants. For many in Vietnam, this award both affirmed the value of Vietnam’s traditions and signified its incorporation into the modern global community. International recognition also boosted the áo dài’s domestic appeal. Within days, stalls and shops throughout Ho Chi Minh City had posted pictures of the winner with signs promising áo dài "just like Miss Vietnam’s."
This paper argues that the Miss Vietnam advertisements are part of Vietnamese designers’ and sellers’ ongoing efforts to market the áo dài as an amalgam of local and global influences. For advice about international fashion trends, these entrepreneurs—most of them women—regularly turn to their relatives overseas. They then use this information to develop new áo dài styles. In this way, Vietnamese women’s traditional role as maintainers of kin relations now gives many of them access to global fashion influences. Incorporating these touches into their designs helps female entrepreneurs make Vietnam’s "national costume" attractive to today’s cosmopolitan consumers.
Diaspora Fashion Entrepreneurs in Global Markets: Emergent National and Transnational Cultural and Commercial Landscapes
Parminder Bhachu, Clark University
My paper examines diasporic cultural production and the multiple transnational movements of South Asian migrants through a fashion economy of formerly "ethnic clothes" which has, in the recent past, moved into mainstream fashion arenas. Based on recent research on South Asian fashion entrepreneurs in England who have spearheaded these new national and transnational rhythms of fashion, it examines the journeys of commodities and images in global arenas in which British South Asian women are assertive cultural and commercial agents. They are global connectors par excellence in transferring their designs and cultural expertise, in this case, through a transnational clothes economy—the now ubiquitous Punjabi or salwaar-kameez suits—across the globe. This commoditization reflects the whole taxonomy of transnational fashion styles, which are further domesticated through the specifications of their British sub-class and sub-cultural locations.
I examine the political sub-texts involved in establishing these diaspora fashion markets, which have recoded national European and transnational cultural and consumer spaces, despite the odds, both racial and commercial. These new landscapes are products of complex and often difficult negotiations of the identities of Asian women and their battles to assert their diasporically-produced British-Asian cultural contexts, through the material culture of a clothes economy. I examine the innovative role of Asian women as cultural and commodity brokers in defining these new consumer spaces through diaspora voices achieved through style and design. Their command over economic resources, design expertise, and technologies to rapidly transfer commodities using modern communications is transforming and defining new global economic and cultural realms.