Organizer: Richmod Bollinger, German Institute for Japanese Studies
Chair: Joan Judge, University of California, Santa Barbara
Discussant: Martha E. Huang, Independent Scholar
Politically-mandated clothing reform and consumer-driven fashion trends have together resulted in distinctively modern clothing cultures, within which dress serves as a substantive sign of difference or belonging, signaling both the construction of an autonomous modernity for the individual, and configurations of power within society at large. Clothes have come to be seen as capable of automatically transforming identities. The impetus for change derives from the movement of peoples and/or ideas and material items both geographically and through time.
In order to understand the relation between clothing and modernism, we have to make sense of the mixing and matching of local elements with what are often known explicitly as "foreign" styles. While clothes as part of the material dress culture play an important part in our analysis, our focus is deliberately on appearance in the widest sense, including ornaments and hairstyles as well as the so-called "biological body," which is also cultural in the sense that bodily form and substance are socially construed.
The panel is organized geographically with a strong transnational focus, featuring contributions related to China, Germany, Japan, and India. While each of the four papers describes a specific repertoire of clothing styles in their wider historical and cultural context, on a broader scale they attempt to explore the coding of clothing as a privileged and contested marker of modernity, gender power, and national identity within the shifting political and economic configurations of various cultures on the brink of modernity. Contributions are accompanied by illustrations and aim to provoke cross-disciplinary explorations of fashion’s multi-layered political fabric.
Menswear and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century China
Robert E. Harrist, Jr., Columbia UniversityDuring the early twentieth century, many Chinese men living in treaty ports and other urban centers began to wear Western clothing. This trend achieved the force of government policy in 1912, when the newly established Republican regime, following precedents set in Japan during the Meiji era, decreed that military and civil officials don Western style uniforms and suits while performing their duties. In private life, Western suits became signifiers of personal freedom and sexual allure and were portrayed as such by burgeoning forms of advertising and popular media.
This paper will examine the tensions provoked in China by the sight of Chinese men wearing Western suits, from around the turn of the century to the beginning of the Pacific War. Although Western clothes worn by Chinese women also provoked heated debate during this period, men’s clothes were an even more vigorously disputed sartorial territory, the site of ideological showdowns between things Chinese and foreign, traditional and modern, provincial and cosmopolitan. Some reformers argued that tailored suits were the appropriate form of dress for men living in a modernizing nation intent on playing a role in international commercial and diplomatic life. But to many of his countrymen, a Chinese male dressed in a Western suit was a sartorial and cultural misfit, an impostor aping foreign ways who belonged in no discernible category of society and was at home in neither east nor west.
Gandhi, Khadi, and Modernity: The Invention of Indian National Dress
Emma Tarlo, University of LondonThe familiar image of Mahatma Gandhi dressed in a white khadi (hand-spun hand-woven cotton) dhoti (loincloth) is often interpreted as a symbol of the timelessness and simplicity of Indian tradition. However, once it is realized that Gandhi only adopted the dhoti at the age of 52 following three decades of experimentation with Western dress, it becomes clear that Gandhi’s outfit was as much a product of modernity as of Indian tradition. It was part of a creative re-invention of Indian identity under colonial conditions.
This paper focuses on Indian responses to the problem of what to wear in the late 19th and early 20th century—a period which began with the increasing adoption and adaptation of European garments by a small privileged elite (mainly men) and which ended with a mass movement for the rejection of European dress and the search for a new national dress for India. Tracing the different strands of sartorial anxiety that the adoption of European clothing engendered in a colonial situation, it focuses in particular on Gandhi’s unique role in embodying these debates through his own clothing changes and through his invention of a new national dress.
The "Sporty Woman" in Weimar Germany
Yumiko Washinosu, Independent ScholarIn the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), bodily exercise enjoyed increasing popularity. Many young women participated in new forms of physical activities such as swimming and dancing. After 1923 a "sporty look" became fashionable. Short hair, a slender supple body, and clothes designed for freedom of movement characterized the lifestyle of a new type of modern woman propagated by the mass media. This boyish image contrasted sharply with earlier idealizations of maternal females. Consequently, contemporary critics often interpreted the "sporty woman" as too masculine, devoid of feminine qualities, and thus virtually sexless, an implicit threat to motherhood.
On the other hand, sports were advocated as being beneficial to women’s health and thus to their reproductive role. Also, athletic female bodies in suitable attire were considered appropriate to an urban lifestyle and useful within the industrial labor force. These two aspects gained in importance after 1928, when physically strong and full-bodied female figures became the widely propagated ideal. To foster women’s awareness of the positive effects of exercise, pamphlets were distributed, all-female sports clubs were established, physical education for girls was promoted, and regular sports activities for women were organized.
The image of the "sporty woman" must therefore be seen as the nexus of competing notions of femininity. While it embodies the ideal of the liberated modern, woman and a new concept of femininity, it also played an important part within an ambiguous value system that assigns women the potentially conflicting roles of mothers and laborers in the advancement of modernity.
Dressed to Will: The Japanese Modan Gâru as Seen in the Context of Modern Urban Culture
Richmod Bollinger, German Institute for Japanese StudiesIn late Taishô Japan (1912–1926), the term modan gâru ("modern girl", later abbreviated to moga) appeared for the first time in print, denoting a new type of women who did not submit to the traditional female ideal and experimented with hitherto gender specific characteristics. Many contemporary texts noted the moga’s striking "modern" and "Western" appearance; such external changes were interpreted as a measure of female self-esteem and as a symptom of an irreversible shift in the relationship between the sexes. The modan gâru figured prominently in the discussion about whether Japan should revert to its Confucian traditions in cultural matters or, as in other aspects of life, emulate the West. More fundamentally, the moga was caught in the cross-fire of debate on the issue of the female principle in a world order on the brink of disintegration.
This paper will concentrate on sketches and caricatures from newspapers and periodicals of the Twenties and early Thirties. Not surprisingly, these materials focus on the moga’s outward appearance, but in a context which raised dress to an act of will, a statement which in the eyes of most contemporary observers transcended the mere whims of fashion. The image of the modan gâru remains strangely bifurcated. Depending on the viewpoint of the observer, she is either the ideal modern working woman, independent both economically and emotionally, who discards the traditional female role in favor of a more conscious and individual way of life; or a purely materialist and fashion-oriented young consumer, egotistic and narcissistic, symptomatic of a declining and decadent society.