Rethinking Fashion Globalization

Sarah Cheang, Erica de Greef, Yoko Takagi, Sarah Cheang, Erica de Greef, Yoko Takagi

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350181304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Fashion & Textile Industry
• Index: Business

Rethinking Fashion Globalization is a timely call to rewrite the fashion system and push back against Eurocentric dominance within fashion histories by presenting new models, approaches and understandings of fashion from critical thinkers at the forefront of decolonial fashion discourse. This edited collection draws together original, diverse, and richly reflective critiques of the fashion system from both established and emerging fashion scholars, researchers and creative practitioners. Chapters straddle current calls for decolonization and inclusion, as well as reflections on de-westernization, post-colonialism, sustainability, transnationalism, national identities, social activism, global fashion narratives, diversity, and more. The volume is divided into three key themes, 'Disruptions in Time and Space', 'Nationalism and Transnationalism' and 'Global Design Practices'. These themes re-map fashion's origins, practices and futures, to present alternatives for reclaiming and rethinking fashion globalization in the 21st century.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Sarah CHEANG, Erica DE GREEF and TAKAGI Yoko

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This book explores the far-reaching cultural entanglements of ‘global fashion’ in terms of fashion’s diverse, overlapping and hybrid contributions to crafting identities, negotiating change, developing technologies and making communities. But, more than this, it proposes a further area of entanglement: the study of ‘global fashion’ itself as an international academic activity which shapes understanding of what fashion is and the roles fashion plays within global flows of culture. This active and explicit rethinking of fashion and globalization calls for a wider range of perspectives and decolonial critiques that support and further develop ongoing attempts to write back against Eurocentricity.

The globalization of fashion is a notion that too often is understood as the global spread of Western fashion, and with it a hierarchy of Eurocentric fashion discourse over other fashion discourses, practices and systems. While the spread of Euro-American fashion styles and systems is undeniable and far-reaching, Western fashion systems are not the whole story.¹ As the image on the cover of this book shows, fashion and globalization can be considered from diverse perspectives, including positions that decentre the Western-centric notion of fashion, and foreground fashion histories that complicate matters of time and space. The kimono featured here was tailored in Japan in the 1980s from block-printed and resist dyed cotton made on the Coromandel coast of India during the 18th century.² Sarasa, also known as cotton calico or chintz, formed part of a significant Indian export industry that globalized Indian design in a flow of fashion textiles from the Indian subcontinent to Egypt and Indonesia in the 13th and 14th centuries or earlier, West Africa from the 15th century³ and Europe from the 17th century.⁴ Such a reading already involves a reimagining of matters of influence, and the need for ‘linguistic and historical competence … far beyond the capacities of any single scholar’.⁵

Using the term ‘sarasa’ to describe this fabric already makes for a shift in thinking and speaking about global fashion. Sarasa is a Portuguese loan word ‘saraça’ for cotton calico, used in Japan from the late 1600s when Portuguese traders brought these fabrics from India to Edo Japan and they were copied by Japanese craftsmen to create Japanese garments.⁶ The owner of this kimono, Kikuchi Nobuko (1925–2016), came across this particular example of sarasa in 1980 at an antique shop in Yurakucho, Tokyo.⁷ She had it tailored into a kimono, and continued to purchase Javanese batik, Congolese kuba cloth and cashmere shawls to fashion garments and accessories for herself to wear.

During the 1980s, women in Japan were not wearing kimono as everyday wear, and the concept solidified of kimono as immutable tradition and thus national costume. Nobuko, on the other hand, developed her own way of wearing kimono, freely and as she liked, as an innovative style choice that would have been perceived as a connoisseur’s deviation. For her, this was a rebellious act.⁸ Frequent travel to Europe with her husband, a collector of Emile Gallé’s Japanese-inspired art nouveau glass work, gave Nobuko awareness of international antiques markets, French fashion, and a view of kimono from outside of Japan. Her kimono collection was passed to her granddaughter Ere, a jazz dance instructor. Ere rarely wears kimono, but she occasionally wears her grandmother’s in order to remember her. In Figure 1.1 she is pictured in her grandmother’s garden reflecting Nobuko’s own aesthetic choices. In this photograph, the 18th/20th century sarasa kimono has been teamed with an obi made from fabric dating from the early 19th century that was a Dutch copy of Indian calico.

In turn, Ere has also begun to craft Japanese fashion from antique transnational textiles, by reusing Nobuko’s kimono collection as a source of textiles for her own fashion brand called ‘ellection_ere’, publicized through Instagram and Facebook. Since 2019 she has been recrafting her grandmother’s kimono into new one-off pieces with an emphasis on the global circulation of fashion, such as the reinvented sukajan (souvenir jacket) depicted in Figure 1.2.⁹ Embroidered flying cranes on a red silk ground, originally from an uchikake (outer-layer wedding kimono), are bordered by blue denim below and a fur collar above, combined with wide kimono sleeves of printed crepe with stream pattern, and styled with jeans and baseball cap in a street setting. In England, embroidered cranes also fly across the back pockets of the jeans worn with pride by youth cultures who prize the Japanese brand Evisu as something exclusive, that sets you apart and shows off your style know-how (Figure 1.3). In Europe, the desirability of Evisu products echoes William Gibson’s novel Zero History that features unattainability, mystery and insider knowledge as driving forces of a Japanese ‘secret’ denim brand identity.¹⁰ Those unable to afford to buy from Evisu’s official retail outlets rely on second-hand markets and other internet selling.¹¹ These practices create much anxiety around fakes and have generated blogs teaching teenagers connoisseur knowledge about the history, materials and construction of Japanese denim.¹²

These complex histories of material and people cannot be understood with conventional histories of chintz as written by a dominant view of European fashion/technological advance and South Asian raw materials/hand-labour, or by studies of global fashion that see Americanization as a force that overwrites or displaces Japaneseness. They do not match accounts of Japanese fashion that separate kimono from fashion, and focus only on Harajuku streetstyle, cosplay and Japanese designers/brands such as Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, and Rei Kawakubo. They do not fit models of fashion globalization that are confined to the homogenizing spread of Euro-American culture or the ‘glocalizing’ activities of multi-national corporations seeking to capture local markets. Long-standing stories of garments and images passing through different places, sometimes repeatedly, lie beyond simple dichotomies. Indeed, this has been amply shown in the work of scholars of African fashion for several decades now, and countless studies of diasporic and postcolonial fashion cultures.¹³ The appetite for Indian fabrics in the 17th century, or American garment types...