By Kimberly Chin
Amid the fashion images that bombard the world with Western culture, last Friday three women explored the identity crisis of keeping with modern fashion while preserving one’s tradition as part of the University’s three-day conference, “Defining Culture Through Dress.”
Each speaker lectured on the importance of modernity for the culture of the East and Southeast Asian nations. The fashions of South Korea, Japan and India were discussed, with an emphasis on the United States’ influence.
Yoo-Kyoung Seok, from the University of Georgia, presented her study on the concepts of modesty and immodesty in South Korean and American college women.
Although South Korea has traditionally been one of the most modest cultures in the world, “the meaning of clothing turned from simple wear to [an] expression of identity” as a result of media influence, Seok said. College students began to wear revealing clothing and show more skin, which were unusual and uncommon until the late 1980s.
The results of Seok’s study revealed that both American and Korean participants defined modesty as situational-whether an outfit is immodest or modest depends on the time and place. In addition, Seok said that while Americans related immodest dress with provocativeness, Koreans related immodest dress with loud colors and exaggerated designs.
Rachel Harris, the registrar of the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in California, followed Seok with a discussion on Japan’s affinity for Western ideals in the 1920s and early 1930s. Harris described the emergence of the “modern girl,” who is characterized as a woman who drinks, smokes, sports a short bob and wears clothing that shows flesh.
“The dress of the modern girl was a manifestation of cultural anxiety regarding the role of women in Japanese culture,” Harris said. In 1853, the ports of Japan were forcibly opened to international trade and the ban on international travel was lifted. As a result, the role of women visibly changed.
“Many women…began to graduate from the newly established school system and began to emerge outside of the home,” Harris added.
Clothing began to mimic popular western styles of the 1920s, including that of the flapper era. Such rapid change gave light to the Japanese material culture today. Harris described this transformation as a marker of group identity, which is pursued even further today.
The third speaker, Arti Sandhu, from Wellington University, spoke about the Indian urban modern class in today’s world.
“Western ideals are localized into contemporary Indian fashion,” Sandhu said. The urban middle class is situated between old and new, local and global, traditional and modern-calling this new cultural space “betweeness.”
Fashion’s prevalence in the Indian market is “especially heightened in dealing with issues of taste, which trickles down from members of high society and those of the west.”
Sandhu believes that fashion is a sign of wealth and power. However, she argues that although modernity loses some of the aspects of traditional identity, it is heavily localized in order to appeal to this urban market.
According to Sandhu, a large influence on this modernizing culture comes from the idealized images of commodities portrayed by the media as “being crucial to their social existence.” The media have a direct impact on how fashion is displayed as a social indicator of upward mobility of class and success.
“Clothing responds to the way the pressures of modernity push and pull at adapting and adopting new material forms and non-material attributes,” Sandhu said. “[It] further shapes the life experience of modernity.”
Arti Sandhu says that changes in Indian culture are heightened by media influence.