Theoretical Framework
My project, Fashioning the Decades: 100 Years of Dressing in a Chinese Diaspora, uses twentieth-century Chinese Canadian women’s self-fashioning practices as a lens to study their senses of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and alienation, ethnic expression and social adaptation. My primary questions for this research are: What are some of the driving forces behind twentieth-century Chinese Canadian women’s changing attitudes toward Chinese fashion from adoption to rejection to re-invention? How do socio-political events and evolving immigration policies shape women’s relationships with their ethnic identities?
Similar questions about refashioning marginalized identities have been explored by scholars of contemporary diasporas and artist-curators who have developed interactive, public-facing projects to work closely with marginalized communities. Stuart Hall’s theory of “identity as a becoming” and Steven Nelson’s interpretations of the contemporary diaspora have informed my understanding of the interviews with Chinese Canadian women. At the same time, my research methodology combines Jin Guo’s oral history project and Cheryl Sim’s curated exhibition, The Fitting Room. It aims to cover individuals’ immigration stories and how their fashion choices reflect their identities and relationship with Chinese culture. Moreover, Julia Petrov’s book, Inventing the Display of Dress, suggests using the museum as a “theatre” and adopting unconventional storytelling methods to enhance theatricality and immersiveness. It has inspired me to create digital avatar models representing Chinese Canadian women of each decade and design their appearances and clothes to echo real-life interview participants.
Hall’s idea of “identity as a becoming” is fundamental to my interpretations of women’s changing fashion choices before and after their coming of age. It encourages me to think about identity and cultural expressions as fluid and constantly evolving, enabling Chinese Canadian women to experiment with clothing and aesthetics to perform who they want to be. On the other hand, Steven Nelson has used his writings to challenge my understanding of diaspora. He encourages me to think that diasporic experiences are not always traumatic to individuals. Instead, these experiences may enable Chinese Canadian women to form a transnational and liberating worldview that engage with values and memories across different cultures. Hall and Nelson’s perspectives on identity formations are crucially important to my project as I am exploring how Chinese Canadian women use fashion styles and material objects from both Chinese and Western cultures to negotiate their transnational identities and whether they view their choices as political purely aesthetic, or otherwise.
Building on this foundational scholarship, my research project adopts the methodology of oral history interviews, which borrows from Jin Guo and Cheryl Sim’s projects, describing above. When researching Voices of Chinese Women (1992), Guo interviewed one hundred and thirty Chinese Canadian women aged between nineteen and eighty-five about their immigration experiences. The resulting book is organized chronologically, with each historical period linked to a different theme reflecting the socio-political events that shaped women’s lives. Sim also utilized interviews as a research method, engaging nineteen women born between 1968 and 1986 in conversations about their relationships with the Chinese national dress, the cheongsam. In contrast, she focused more on women’s fashion attitudes, perceptions of their identities, and relationships with ethnic clothing more than the historical framework. My project combines Sim and Guo’s approaches by using the first half to discuss the participant’s background and immigration history and then moving to discuss their clothing and makeup practices.
Finally, Julia Petrov’s idea of museums as a “theatre” and fashion exhibitions as “performances” has inspired me to animate fashion history in a creative and immersive way. Petrov proposes two essential ideas of displaying costumes in museums. The first is to show costumes with surviving artifacts of the same period, allowing them to complement one another. The second is to create period rooms. These rooms invite the viewers to enter a private but staged world, where life-like mannequins wear period costumes and interact with one another. Based on Petrov’s ideas, I decided to create three-dimensional avatar models representing each decade of the twentieth century to enhance interactivity. The avatar’s clothing, accessories and hairstyles correspond to the surviving garments and accessories of their respective periods as well as the choices of my interview participants based on their aesthetics. Each model is linked to an interview video with a Chinese Canadian woman about that decade. In addition, each gallery room in the exhibition uses wallpaper that echoes the time period to evoke theatricality and a feeling of nostalgia.
