Reorienting Fashion: Dress, Culture, and East Asia

This seminar seeks to impart a broad understanding of the history and ideas of East Asian fashion from the seventeenth century to present, featuring a global perspective and transcultural approaches. The course will consist of two parts. The first part examines the role of fashion in the changing social, cultural, and political systems in China and Japan. We will discuss how certain styles and silhouettes came to embody new gender identities, manifest nationalism in an age of crises, and symbolize ethnic tradition as time went by. We will pay special attention to the issues of how interactions with the West and globalization led to sartorial modernity and reinvention of the tradition in East Asia. The second part explores the multivalent construction and meanings of “East Asian dress” in global art and fashion. Issues to be discussed include Oriental clothing as inspirations for Western artistic movements and dress reforms, cross-cultural dressing, Asian elements in contemporary fashion by both Western and Asian designers, and museum exhibitions of Asian and Asia-inspired dress. This session prepares students with diverse approaches and theories for analyzing cultural exchanges through fashion. The course will schedule one visit to the storeroom at the Met to study selected examples of historical garments. Interdisciplinary methodologies and approaches are encouraged. Students are welcome to develop final projects that focus on fashion in other regions of Asia and their roles in the global imagination. 3 credits. Satisfies the non-Western requirement.