Staging Japanese Femininity: Cross-cultural Dressing in Australian Photography

Abstract

The popularity of Japanese inspired dress in portrait photographs of middle-class Australian women and girls during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offers new insight into cross-cultural dressing and its links to identity. Rather than simply mirroring Orientalist fantasies of the distant and exotic East, these photographs indicate how Anglo-Australian women’s material cultural practices spoke to their own experiences of modernity and their impressions of Japanese femininity. Through their production and consumption of Japanese inspired fashion, musical theatre, decorative arts and travel photographs, these women were encouraged to respond to their admiration of Japanese femininity with their own embodied performances for the camera. Photographs of Australian women and girls in kimonos also illuminate the complexity of Australia’s cultural engagement with Japan in the era of the racially exclusive “White Australia” policy and Japanese imperialist incursions in the Asia-Pacific region. In staging their perceptions of Japanese femininity at home and in the photographer’s studio, Australian women also reconciled a series of conflicting ideals associated with dress reform, women’s suffrage and the “new woman.”