Politics Of Dress Research Articles

Singular Modes: The Politics of Dress in Cavendish, Evelyn, and Hutchinson

Singular Modes: The Politics of Dress in Cavendish, Evelyn, and Hutchinson

Fashion, Women and Power: The Politics of Dress, Denise N. Rall (ed.) (2022)

Review of: Fashion, Women and Power: The Politics of Dress, Denise N. Rall (ed.) (2022) Bristol: Intellect Ltd., 235 pp., ISBN 978-1-78938-461-1, p/bk, £22.00/$29.99

Social Histories of Iran: Modernism and Marginality in the Middle East

Social Histories of Iran: Modernism and Marginality in the Middle East

MeXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction

MeXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction

Fashioning Gender in Asia and Beyond

Fashioning Gender in Asia and Beyond

A Brief Discussion of Asian Women in Leadership

As never before, women are rightfully in positions of political power, and into the maelstrom of mass media challenges to their fashions and their right to govern. Fraught narratives surround the clothing of women in leadership in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, and Indonesia. There is an enduring relationship between women and dress which needs to be examined in regard to how clothing choices inform and articulate the ways in which women remain represented as either suitable or not for public office, how they may be lauded or damned when they are in power. In Women and Power: The Politics of Dress it is argued by several authors that political dress for women in the Asia-Pacific expresses a complex set of political and cultural legacies as it impacts their style of government and appearance. Cultural legacies are, in some cases, determined by choice or rejection of ethnic clothing of the past. When Myanmar leader Aung San Sui-Kyi chose to wear versions of her native costume, she offered the physical appearance of her commitment to government by the people, rather than the military (124). She was deposed from office and imprisoned after a military coup in 2021, and Myanmar currently remains under military rule. Interesting examples of ‘native costume’ in politics include: the former ‘first lady’ of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, and her use of the classic Filipina ‘butterfly dress’ (122), and former Chief Executive of Hong Kong Carrie Lam’s adoption of the ancient Chinese ‘qipao’ or ‘cheong sam’ (129). Other legacies include the very strict set of attire worn by brides entering the Japanese royal family, and further honorifics as exemplified by the wedding clothes of Princess-by-marriage Masako and her subsequent rise to Empress of Japan (63-72). Contrary to country- and cultural-specific clothing for much of Asia, political dress for women includes the overwhelming impact of western culture on garments through mass media, such as television and films, and more recently, the socials. (130). Theories regarding political attire of non-Western women in leadership risk the notion of ‘stereotyping’ through the Western view of the ‘exoticism’ of women through ‘Oriental costuming’ (121). As noted above, there is a legitimate option for Asian women to select their garments to express both cultural traditions alongside their employment of Westernised or popular fashion, or even haute couture. For instance, more Avant Garde designer clothing was important to former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and others (128). Further, clothing worn by women in politics offers the opportunity to express not only the political aspirations of their country and its role in global negotiations. Women politicians' use of distinctive country-based designers in India, Pakistan, Japan, Indonesia, and China (PRC) when on the global stage has been defined as ‘sartorial diplomacy’ (13). Promoting the fashion of one’s native country has also been defined as ‘soft power’ (13). Likewise, the use of ‘native’ or country-centric costume has offered women in leadership to mix a national form of identify politics as befits their nation’s goals (13). Finally, meeting nationalistic goals within the bounds of a culturally-based sense of women’s proper roles in society, i.e. placing family and children first can be challenging, if not impossible, with their own wishes to display their own identity through the adoption of contemporary fashion. Finally, how women leaders dress is subject to critical commentary through mass media and the socials, where appearance takes on a disproportionate level of importance (16). Women who rise to political prominence will need to continue to ‘call out’ inappropriate commentary on their attire that undermines their authority to govern their countries as men have done without question. Excerpted from the following: Denise N. Rall (ed.). Fashion, Women and Power: The Politics of Dress. Bristol: Intellect / Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2022. Author Biography Denise N. Rall, Adjunct Fellow – Research [pending], in Humanities & Social Sciences, Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW, was awarded her PhD in 2007. Since 2008, Denise relocated her academic and artistic interests to fashion and textiles through a critical lens to view the sociology of clothing and its role in society. Latest book: Fashion, Women & Power: The Politics of Dress published in 2022.

From Secret Fashion Shoots to the #100projectors

From Secret Fashion Shoots to the #100projectors

Iconic 21st Century Activist "T-Shirt and Tote-Bag" Combination Is Hard to Miss These Days!

Iconic 21st Century Activist "T-Shirt and Tote-Bag" Combination Is Hard to Miss These Days!

Politics of Dress and Appearance

Politics of Dress and Appearance

MeXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction ed. by Aída Hurtado and Norma E. Cantú

Reviewed by: meXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction ed. by Aída Hurtado and Norma E. Cantú Amanda Ellis meXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction. Edited by Aída Hurtado and Norma E. Cantú. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020. iv + 330 pp. $105.00 hardcover/$34.95 paper. meXicana Fashions explores the complex cultural politics undergirding various aesthetic modes, self-adornment traditions, and shared vestimentary practices and their relationship to Xicana identity formation and cultural belonging. This dynamic, unparalleled edited collection is organized into three sections: “Rendering of Self: Personal Narratives/Personal Adornment,” “The Politics of Dress: Saying It Loud/Saying It Clear,” and “The Politics of Entrepreneurship: Making (It)/Selling (It).” Through thirteen chapters, the volume illuminates the significance of fashion, performance, and personal aesthetics as reactive processes and “strategic weapon[s] of public self-presentation” by teasing out the ways fashion is leveraged to counter the stigmatization and derogation of social identity (14). The volume’s raison d’être is to “argue that meXicanas are exposed to more fashion and aesthetic vocabularies than those floating in the hegemonic sea of fashion” and that these vocabularies constitute an array of political meanings behind Xicana sartorial choices (14). Garments like huipiles and accessories like sarapes, rebozos, and huaraches are understood as stylized multidimensional cultural phenomena that make up the tactical practices and visual semantics that variously signify meXicanidad. Ergo, the volume theoretically situates dress as an everyday mode or technology of resistance by which people “declare allegiance to particular intersectional identities or . . . refute them” (8). The single greatest strength of this collection is its diverse interdisciplinary and topical reach. meXicana Fashions forwards the analysis of poetry, novelistic [End Page 190] discourse, visual archives, blogging practices, and song lyrics by bringing together literary criticism, auto-ethnographies, transcribed platicas, and the qualitative and quantitative content analysis of mass (print) media. Several chapters contribute to discussions of decoloniality, as they relate to self-stylization, Indigenous fashion shows, and community art exhibitions. Each chapter sophisticatedly elaborates the conceptual terrain in which to wrestle with fashion in relationship to political praxis, effectively illuminating the ways sartorial choices become the mechanisms by which people articulate ownership of their bodies by refashioning, asserting, and/or reclaiming an identity through self-adornment. In the first section, Norma E. Cantú contends that though the huipil garment is linked to a specific region of origin and communal group, huipiles take on new politically charged meanings when donned by Chicanas. The volume opens with the voices of women who “claim the garment as a signifier of Indigenous identity” and who self-consciously don the huipil as a “referent to their ethnic identity, albeit one that has been denied them as mestizas” (41). Chapter 2 forwards Josie Méndez-Negrete’s intimate retrospection and visual art that recounts how sewing and embroidery became central to her survival and metamorphosis after her move to the United States. She vividly describes the huipil as part of a counter-aesthetic and as “a living, inspiring, and protective garment” that announces both her own indigeneity and her solidarity with other Indigenous women (68). In chapter 3, Micaela Díaz-Sánchez interviews women in the professoriate who use clothing as part of an expressive technique and political intervention, describing dress as part of “a choreography enacted by Chicana academics” as they navigate academic institutions (74). Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs’s auto-ethnography renders an analysis of song lyrics and common refrains to think through the complex signification of attire in chapter 4. The author ultimately asserts that though ethnic outsiders can only “abstractly and at best marginally comprehend the deep cultural meaning instilled” in Maya garments, “Indigenous clothes carry an equally immense value for Chicanas, serving as a deeply personal expression” of identity (101). Chapter 5 closes out the first section of the volume, and in it Domino Renee Perez poetically grapples with her South Texas familial legacy through close readings of vintage family photographs and dress practices to reflect on the relationships between intergenerational memory, adornment, family resemblance, and belonging. The second section begins with an ethnographic exploration of women’s use of the quinceañera tradition and consumer...

Democracy and the Politics of Dress, Color and, Symbols: An Anthropological Study of Kerala Politics

Dhoti colors have apparent political meaning in contemporary Kerala. Communists have started wearing red dhoti in private and public life recently, to counter the rampant visibility of saffron dhoti, which signifies Hindu religious identity in a shared meaning that exist in villages across north Kerala, and the same dhoti has also turned as the symbol of right-wing Hindu political parties, the political rival of the Communist party in the state. Earlier, the saffron dhoti was very popular among Hindus in Kerala, without any political differences—liberal Hindus, right-wing political Hindus, secular Hindus, and communist Hindus used to wear the saffron dhoti in public life, and to an extent, the saffron dhoti had become a crucial part of the religious piety of Hindu men and a religious symbol of mobility among Hindus. Through understanding the process of making meaning and other apparatus for political mobilization, this article argues that the ideological differences between right-wing Hindu nationalist organizations and Communist party does not exist at microlevel village politics, where there is a crucial similarity between political parties in mobilizing people and other activities of politics in a social democratic system.

Dissent Dressing: The Colour and Fabric of Political Rage

Dissent Dressing: The Colour and Fabric of Political Rage

Fashioning Parliament: The Politics of Dress in Myanmar’s Postcolonial Legislatures

AbstractThis article discusses the significance of dress codes and clothing in postcolonial Myanmar’s successive legislatures. Burmese representatives have since the 1950s been strongly encouraged to wear dignified garb and non-Western dress when carrying out their duties in parliament. What does it tell us? The contribution of this study based on field interviews and the analysis of newspaper reports and parliamentary procedures, is threefold. It first sheds light on Myanmar’s understudied parliamentary history and some of its startling institutional continuities despite decades of military rule. It then shows how the fashioning and reinvention of traditional attires by Burmese parliamentarians has accelerated the pace of decolonisation, while serving as an effective tool of representation. Lastly, it argues that the ritual of dress in parliament has contributed to a persistent reification of identities, thereby reinforcing the politicisation of ethnicity in an already fragmented Myanmar society.

The Empire's New Clothes: The Politics of Dress in Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable

(2016). The Empire's New Clothes: The Politics of Dress in Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable. South Asian Review: Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 109-121.

Clothing and social movements: Tibet and the politics of dress

The ‘cultural turn’ in social movement studies has brought a renewed outlook on new social movements and lifestyle movements. In this development on the symbolic challenge of contemporary movements, research has expanded to both music and art. However, little is known about the role of clothing in movements and how activists use it for social change. In making the case for a greater consideration of clothing’s tactical use in identity work, this paper explores the case of the Tibetan Lhakar movement. I argue that for Lhakar activists, clothing is the materialization of the political consciousness of the movement and symbolically acts as a mechanism of communication in shaping its political goals. By using social media to observe individualized collective actions of wearing Tibetan clothing, the paper demonstrates how activists frame and create new political opportunity structures for civic participation in a one party state that controls all speech and movement.

Wearing Black, Wearing Bows: Union women and the politics of dress in the US fashion press, 1861–1865

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes how leading US fashion periodicals Peterson's Magazine and Godey's Lady's Book discussed women's fashions on the Northern home front during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Primarily defining fashion magazines and clothing as pleasurable refuges from the horrors of war, Godey's and Peterson's nonetheless indicated that women's fashion choices were important to the broader war effort, arguing that women's sartorial decisions helped to demonstrate the virtue of their nation. Godey's and Peterson's thus operated as complex, contradictory spaces for middle-class female readers. In some respects serving as a welcome respite from direct discussions of war, these periodicals also placed considerable pressure on Northern women to live up to high standards of fashionable femininity as part of their patriotic duty to the nation. The fashion media thus at once served as a potential source of, even as it was a release from, Northern women's wartime anxieties.

Fashioning the nation: Gender and politics of dress in contemporary Kyrgyzstan

This article investigates gendered nationalist ideologies and their attendant myths and narratives in present-day Kyrgyzstan through an investigation of clothing items and practices. Clothes “speak volumes,” revealing tensions between gendered narratives of nationhood and various interpretations of what “proper” Kyrgyz femininities and masculinities should be. Clothing thus becomes both a sign and a site of the politics of identity, inscribing power relations and individual strategies of Kyrgyz men and women onto their bodies. Individual clothing choices and strategies take place within the general context of discursive struggles over what authentic and appropriate representations of Kyrgyzness should be. Thus, such clothing items as ak kalpak (conical felt hats) and the practice of Muslim women covering their head (hijab) acquire social and political meanings that stand for wider processes of identity contestations in the country.

(Re)Fashioning Biafra: Identity, Authorship, and the Politics of Dress in <em>Half of a Yellow Sun</em> and Other Narratives of the Nigeria-Biafra War

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s second novel, Half of a Yellow (2006), is one in a long line of works by Nigerian authors to portray the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967-1970). While Adichie has stated that she wanted to make modern Nigeria aware of its history by writing the novel, the writer has also revealed that she drew from past literary portrayals to construct her narrative. In order to untangle the complex construction of Half of a Yellow Sun, this article explores the way the novel negotiates the literary legacy of Biafra through material fashion, which I argue elucidates this complex intertextuality. Furthermore, I contend that the novel draws attention to and critiques the way that understanding of Biafra has been dominated by novels written by male authors, and weaves threads of material fashion in order to offer a new way of negotiating Nigerian history.

‘It Gave Us Our Nationality’: US Education, the Politics of Dress and Transnational Filipino Student Networks, 1901–45

Gender & HistoryVolume 26, Issue 3 p. 565-588 Article ‘It Gave Us Our Nationality’: US Education, the Politics of Dress and Transnational Filipino Student Networks, 1901–45 Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, Sarah Steinbock-PrattSearch for more papers by this author Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, Sarah Steinbock-PrattSearch for more papers by this author First published: 13 October 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12089Citations: 13Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume26, Issue3Special Issue: ‘Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges’, Gender & History 26, 3 (2014)November 2014Pages 565-588 RelatedInformation

Book review: The Politics of Dress in Somali Culture, written by Heather Marie Akou

Book review: The Politics of Dress in Somali Culture, written by Heather Marie Akou