Meet The Speakers

Rachel Silberstein 

SOAS, University of London

“Chinese National Dress and the International Health Exhibition of 1884”

In 1884, the 4 million visitors attending the Chinese Court at the International Health Exhibition held in South Kensington, London, got to see an exhibit of Chinese dress. Entitled “Costumes and Lay Figures illustrating the Chinese National Costume at Various Seasons of the Year,” the display comprised 43 figures: male and female; adult, youth, child; Manchu and Han. Each figure wore an outfit differentiated by occasion and season, including underclothing, garments, headwear, footwear, jewellery, and accessories. One of the earliest displays of Chinese dress in the West and one of several international displays of Chinese culture organized by the Imperial Maritime Customs Service (IMCS), the display featured three striking features. First, by deploying life-size figures set in recreations of Beijing rooms, it presented an ethnographic approach to Chinese dress that would later be overtaken by the imperially enthralled connoisseurship that was in fact privileged in its chosen figures. Second, despite the claims of national dress systems, the costumes chosen were inherently local: gathered in the capital, they reflected late nineteenth-century Beijing fashions in pattern and cut. And last, contrary to established interpretations of the world fairs as promoting Western technology and modernity, this display and its associated literature actually promoted the superiority of the Chinese mode of dressing, often explicitly in comparison to Western modes, then undergoing a process of reform informed by global dress systems, including those of China. By exploring the display and its use of National Costume along these three main themes, I consider what Chinese National Costume meant to its audience at this very particular late nineteenth-century moment: an international exhibition devoted to progress in hygiene and sanitation, underpinned by late Victorian notions of civilizational hierarchy.

Rachel Silberstein is a historian of Chinese dress and textiles. Currently Senior Teaching Fellow and Co-Convenor of the Arts of China module on the SOAS-Alphawood Postgraduate Diploma in Asian Art, she earned a DPhil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford in 2015. Her monograph, A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing (University of Washington Press, 2020) – a study of fashion and textile handicrafts in early modern China – won the Costume Society of America’s Millia Davenport Publication Award 2021 and an honorable mention from the 2023 Bei Shan Tang Monograph Prize. Rachel has published widely on Qing fashion in the journals West 86th, Fashion Theory, Costume, and Late Imperial China. Her research has been supported by the Institute of Advanced Studies, the Pasold Fund, the Institute of Historical Research, the Association of Asian Studies, and the British Academy. 

Genevieve Clutario 

Wellesley College

“Tensions at the Seams: Petty Politics and Sartorial Battles”

Tensions at the Seams tracks the consequences of the shift from the Spanish to the US colonial regime following the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars at the turn of the twentieth century. This presentation centers encounters and confrontations between Filipina mestiza elites and white American women. Intended friendly encounters were often rife with tension that manifested in sartorial displays. In the memoirs, diaries,and letters written by white American women in the Philippines, imperial aggression engendered by the collision of social and racial hierarchies took played out as sartorial competition. Gowns and accessories became the weapons used to undermine the others’ sense of privilege. Embedded in gossip and expressions of jealousy and disdain were competing ideologies of whiteness, privilege, and respectability. Diamonds, pearls, and gowns became the battlegrounds over which shifting definitions of whiteness and superiority were negotiated. By demonstrating how beauty and fashion powerfully determined individual and cultural practices as well as national and transnational politics, Clutario offers new ways of understanding the centrality of beauty in the making of imperial and nationalist power.

Genevieve Clutario is an Associate Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines,1898 - 1941, and is the recipient of the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University First Book Award, and honorable mention for the Association for Asian American Studies book prize in History. Her research and teaching interests focus on Asian American narratives in global perspectives; comparative histories of culture and modern empire; and the politics of fashion and beauty. She’s currently working on a second book that continues her research on beauty and glamour as a political force, focusing on the Cold War, the Marcos regime, and of course beauty queens. 

Minjee Kim 

Research Associate, Tracing Patterns Foundation

“Hanbok as Nation: Cultural Paradoxes of Korean Dress”

As a symbolic embodiment of Korean ethnicity and national identity, hanbok, the traditional Korean dress, has long been associated with notions of cultural continuity and authenticity. Yet from the very inception of the term to its contemporary manifestations, both the conceptual and visual dimensions of hanbok have evolved amid profound historical ruptures. These transformations unfolded within broader contexts of colonial subjugation, Cold War division, modern nation-building, and globalization. Over this period, Korea’s political, economic, social, and technological systems underwent unprecedented, discursively charged restructuring, fundamentally reshaping the materiality, cultural meanings, and sartorial boundaries of hanbok.

This study interrogates the dominant perception of hanbok as a “core material tradition of Korea,” characterized by “timelessness” and “authenticity,” by tracing its evolving definitions, stylistic divergences, subcategorizations, and appropriation across national and global contexts—including processes of unwitting self-decolonization. Contrary to nationalist narratives, hanbok ensembles in fact incorporate numerous foreign-origin components and retain the imprint of colonial legacies. The term hanbok, coined during the early modern period, originally served to distinguish native dress from Western-style clothing (yangbok). However, ongoing aesthetic innovations, shaped by socio-cultural shifts, have blurred the distinction between the two, creating an interstitial sartorial space that complicates the very definition of hanbok. These paradoxes illuminate the constructed and contested nature of hanbok as national dress and reposition it within broader debates on fashion, identity, and postcoloniality in the Asian context.

Minjee Kim, Ph.D., is a San Francisco-based historian specializing in Korean dress, fashion, and textiles. She earned her doctorate from Seoul National University and has taught at Jeonju Kijeon College, Seoul National University, and the Academy of Art University. Her lectures have been hosted by major institutions including the J. Paul Getty Museum, V&A Academy, UCLA, and the Fashion Institute of Technology. Bridging fashion history, material culture, and cultural studies, her research adopts an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective. She is co-editor of Dress History of Korea: Critical Perspectives on Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2023).

Sarah Frederick 

Boston University

“Kimono as Japanese and Asian Dress in Imperial Japan (1905–1945)”

The paper first introduces the ways the modern “kimono” was reframed as an indicator of traditional Japanese dress as part of the emergence of the modern state, while, at the same time was seen as part of a global cosmopolitan modernist culture, enabled also by European representations of kimono. The paper will show examples of how Japanese dress was used, in combination with Western dress, during the height of Japanese colonialism in Asia to articulate power relationships, such as Japan’s concept of the “Great Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.” One example will include costume illustrations and descriptions from a Japanese popular novel The Man from the Moon set in Vietnam in 1941, which explores the relationship among a Japanese man, Vietnamese woman, and a Japanese woman. While the focus will be on the era before and during the Pacific War, the paper will touch upon the legacy of these dynamics from the middle of the 20th century to the present day.

Sarah Frederick is associate professor of Japanese literature at Boston University. She is the author of Turning Pages: Reading and Writing Women’s Magazines in Interwar Japan (University of Hawaii). She is currently writing a biography of popular woman writer Yoshiya Nobuko (1896-1970), including representations of clothing in her work. She has also received a Bunka Fashion Research Institute and Japanese government fellowship for collaborative research on representations of kimono in modern culture. As part of that project, she viewed museum textile collections and print culture archives with a team of textile, history, and anthropology experts.

Alexandra Dalferro 

University of California, Berkeley

“National Dress, Royal Appearance, and Resistance in Thailand”

In 1960, King Bhumipol (Rama IX) and Queen Sirikit of Thailand embarked on a seven-­month international tour with state visits in Europe and the United States; the subtext of these official appearances was to reassure Western powers that Thailand was not susceptible to communist threats. As the trip approached, the matter of visual appearance became paramount when Sirikit realized that Thailand lacked easily identifiable national dress styles. A team of designers was hastily assembled to work with the queen, and the group developed eight styles drawn from historical accounts of female dress. Sirikit and Bhumipol were then able to smooth concerns over communism partly through their wardrobe of shimmering silk couture.

This paper situates the story of the creation of “Thai national dress” in relation to contemporary practices and debates around national style-fashion-dress in Thailand. I consider how the death of Bhumibol in 2016 and the following year-long mourning period resulted in intensified scrutiny of the body and its techniques of comportment and presentation, and catalyzed an ongoing period of reckoning in Thailand. Waves of protests over the past 10 years feature demands to address entrenched hierarchies, including reform of the monarchy, and style-fashion-dress remains a central, and risky, medium of communication and resistance. In analyzing the legacy of Sirikit and the royal family’s clinging to power via many aesthetic modes, including clothing, I explore the possibilities and limits of political expression through self-presentation.

Alexandra Dalferro is the Program Director at the Center for Southeast Asia Studies at UC Berkeley. She completed her PhD in Anthropology at Cornell University, and she is currently revising her book manuscript, which explores the politics and practices of silk making in Thailand and the social relations generated through encounters with silk.  She was a Visiting Fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore in 2022 and a Lecturer at NUS College from 2022-2023. Her research and curatorial interests encompass textiles, dress, and material culture of Southeast Asia, especially Thailand and Cambodia; genealogies of "craft" and "art" in Southeast Asia; vernacular aesthetics; gender and sexuality; art and activism; and ecology and human and non-human relations. 

Parminder Bhachu 

Clark University

“Stitching Diasporic Nationhood through Design, Fashion, Improvisation, and Mobility”

In this paper I will interrogate how the new is innovated and discovered through stitching and designing clothes, to render fluid national identities. I write as an academically orientated seamstress myself. I will focus both on the seamstresses and retail design innovators, the boutique owners, who both improvise the material culture of clothes and manipulate design to form their very own versions of nationhood. In so doing they generate new versions of national identities by transforming formerly denigrated Asian “ethnic” clothes into influential high couture and street fashion. By so doing, they challenged the dress codes of mainstream of status quo class hierarchies.

We know that groundbreaking designers possess inheritances of tailoring and sewing, craft expertise that they deployed in trail brazing design economies. These include Coco Chanel, Alexander McQueen, Chrisitan Dior, Vivienne Westwood, Calvin Klein. These high-profile designers with legacies of sewing have much in common with diasporic seamstresses who honed their skills in pioneering “economies of need” in which professional tailors were absent. I tell the stories of these resourceful and innovative seamstresses and designers, whose experience of movement and disruption, parallels that of pioneering American women who also created new versions of American-ness. 

Similarly late 19th and early 20th century Jewish immigrant tailors from Eastern Europe and Germany were architects of the American garment and high fashion industries. Quintessential American and international identities in their complexities were shaped by Hollywood fashion and costume designers whose style flair was rooted in the immigrant garment industry and their needle and stitching expertise.

Parminder Bhachu is the author of Movers and Makers: Resilience, Uncertainty and Migrant Creativity in Worlds of Flux (2021), Twice Migrants (1985) and Dangerous Designs (2004) and co-editor of both Enterprising Women (1986) and Immigration and Entrepreneurship (1991). She is a Professor Emerita of Sociology at Clark University. She was Henry R. Luce Professorship in Cultural Identities and Global Processes for nine years and a Director of Women’s Studies.

Martina Thucnhi Nguyen 

Baruch College, City University of New York

“Madame Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, the Second Republic, and Reimagining Vietnamese Imperial Motifs in a Postcolonial Moment”

Nguyễn Thị Mai Anh was the wife of President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and first lady of the Second Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam) from 1967–1975. Her tenure came at the height of the Vietnam War, which was fought not just on the battlefield, but also in the global and domestic media to influence public opinion. Like in the United States, the public images of Vietnamese first ladies, from their event appearances to their clothing, were scrutinized. Madame Thiệu would wield the áo dài on the domestic and global stage in service of her husband’s political agendas. This paper builds upon research conducted for the exhibition “The Vietnamese Ao Dai in a Time of War: Fashion, Citizenship and Nationalism, 1954–1975” by examining Madame Thiệu’s frequent use of an iconic Nguyễn Dynasty (1802–1945) motif in her public appearances: a five-taloned dragon on imperial yellow background, most closely associated with the long bào (dragon robes) worn by Vietnamese emperors. Using archival documents, news media, and family accounts, this study argues that Madame Thiệu’s appropriation of these imperial motifs reimagines RVN national identity and heritage in a postcolonial moment marked by violent conflict, claiming a historical continuity with the feudal past that stands in direct contrast with the revolutionary rupture promoted by communist North Vietnam. 

Martina Thucnhi Nguyen is Associate Professor of History at Baruch College, City University of New York. An historian of modern Southeast Asia, her research focuses on colonialism, intellectual life, social and political reform, fashion, and gender in twentieth century Vietnam. Her book, On Our Own Strength: The Self-Reliant Literary Group and Cosmopolitan Nationalism in Late Colonial Vietnam, was published in 2021 by University of Hawai'i Press as part of Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Studies Institute book series. She is currently writing a gender history of patriarchy and how it became woven into Vietnamese national identity. She is co-curator of the exhibition, The Vietnamese Áo Dài in a Time of War: Fashion, Citizenship, and Nationalism (1954–1975).

Carla Jones 

University of Colorado Boulder

“Gauzy Yet Firm: The Blouse at the Center of Indonesian Soft Power” 

In spite of its complex aesthetic and ethnic origins, the kebaya has proved a reliable tool for Indonesian national, activist, and diplomatic initiatives. Formally adopted as a component of national dress (baju nasional) upon independence in 1949 and again in 1978, the kebaya, together with its partner piece, the kain (a sarong made of batik or a local woven textile), has become synonymous with Indonesian femininity, even though it is worn in much of insular Southeast Asia. Its flexibility in silhouette (loose to fitted) and fabric (sheer to opaque), paired with its familiar features of long sleeves and discreet front closures are emblematic of an essential national elegance. That elegance has been celebrated by generations of Indonesian national elites, each seeking mutable evidence of the homegrown, authentic beauty of Indonesian tradition. Close analysis of its new iconicity over the past decade illustrates how this hyper-visibility is framed as the rediscovery of a garment understood to be both timeless yet forgotten. This essay will analyze three examples of new forms of kebaya-as-nation that have been central to political style, each of which flexibly center interpretations of softness: the creation of National Kebaya Day in 2023, the popular appeal of retro-style kebayas in the TV series Gadis Kretek (Cigarette Girl) which obliquely addressed the 1965 killings, and the use of fashionable kebayas by the new Prabowo government’s international diplomacy efforts. Each example illustrates the selective celebration of the kebaya’s diverse aesthetic components to establish softness as a form of political communication.

Carla Jones’ research analyzes the cultural politics of appearance in urban Indonesia, with particular focus on femininity, domesticity, aesthetics and Islam. She has written extensively on self-improvement programs, manners and middle-class respectability during the Suharto and post-Suharto periods in Yogyakarta and Jakarta, and is the co-editor, with Ann Marie Leshkowich and Sandra Niessen, of Re-Orienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress (Berg, 2003). Her current work situates anxieties about Islamic style in the context of broader debates about corruption and exposure and forms of political communication via style, including in recent articles on fashion and protest.

Karen M. Teoh 

Independent Scholar

“Heritage in Motion: The Kebaya and Multiethnic History in Malaysia and Singapore”

This paper explores the enduring popularity of the kebaya, a traditional women’s blouse with Javanese origins, and how its current ubiquity as cultural icon and consumer object both supports and subverts national narratives of multi-racial harmony in Malaysia and Singapore. The kebaya is typically (though not exclusively) associated with Straits Chinese, or Peranakan, communities, which were formed by marriage between local Malay women and migrant Chinese men. The women, called Nyonya, literally and figuratively embodied ethnic integration and hybridity­–a synthesis that is now lauded as part of the postcolonial state’s success in multi-racial nation building. Yet historically, Nyonya and the Peranakan community were also targets of criticism because of these very same qualities. Today, popular media emphasizes portrayals and consumption of “feminine” aspects of Peranakan culture (e.g., clothing and food), while downplaying more controversial and “masculine” elements (e.g., having multiple nationalities). By linking femininity, tradition, and racial hybridity in the figure of the kebaya-clad Nyonya, these projects reify stereotypes about gender and cultural identity and replace transgression with nostalgia. The kebaya’s popularity also emerged from the state’s standardized roster of traditional costumes for various ethnic groups, developed for tourism and to foster national unity. Even as the concept of national costumes seems essentializing, the kebaya has taken on a life of its own in its broad appeal and potential for creative adoption by every generation. The personal nature of the kebaya as an oft-worn garment with specific aesthetic features makes it more resistant to simple co-optation by state agendas and commercial forces. 

Dr. Karen Teoh is an Independent Scholar and historian of the overseas Chinese, with a particular focus on gender, ethnicity, socio-cultural identities, and other aspects of migration and diaspora. She was most recently Director of Asian Studies and Associate Professor of History at Stonehill College, and is now a Research Associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard. Her publications include a book, Schooling Diaspora, with Oxford University Press, and articles in scholarly journals such as Twentieth-century China and Cross-Currents. She is currently working on a social history of gambling in the Chinese diaspora. 

Ann Marie Leshkowich 

College of the Holy Cross

“Femininity, Embodiment, and National Dress in Vietnam”

The áo dài—a long tunic with side slits worn over wide-legged pants—is celebrated as an enduring symbol of Vietnamese cultural heritage. This paper shows, however, that the garment became Vietnam’s “national costume” and uniform for high school girls in the early twentieth century because proponents championed it as training women to embody normative femininity in order to represent the modern Vietnamese nation. Today, although men sometimes wear áo dài, the garment is closely associated with idealized notions of Vietnamese femininity, such as grace, refinement, and gentleness. The garment in fact physically inculcates these qualities by shaping the wearer’s comportment and reception by others. This dynamic is especially apparent for the iconic white áo dài that serves as a uniform for high school girls. The áo dài uniform fell out of favor due to socialist concerns about its bourgeois associations, only to reemerge in the early 1980s after a principal in Cà Mau championed it as making class distinctions less obvious. Today, high school girls throughout the country are required to wear áo dài one or more days per week. Controversy about this practice reveals ongoing anxiety about the reproduction of Vietnamese culture and the tenacity of expectations that women should transmit it through their physical appearance. 

Ann Marie Leshkowich is Professor of Anthropology at College of the Holy Cross. She researches gender, economic transformation, class, fashion, and social work in Vietnam. She is author of Essential Trade: Vietnamese Women in a Changing Marketplace (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014; awarded Harry J. Benda Prize, 2016) and co-editor of Traders in Motion: Identities and Contestations in the Vietnamese Marketplace (Cornell University Press, 2018), Neoliberalism in Vietnam (positions: asia critique, 2012), and Re-Orienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress (Berg, 2003). Her research has been published in American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, and Fashion Theory. She is co-curator of the exhibition, The Vietnamese Áo Dài in a Time of War: Fashion, Citizenship, and Nationalism (1954–1975). 

Angela Jansen, Keynote Speaker 

Research Collective for Decoloniality and Fashion 

“Positioned Relational Fashion: A Decolonial Option for Traditional/National Dress.”

Throughout the twentieth century, most colonised countries found themselves forced to formulate unifying national identities to unite against a foreign enemy. Often for the first time, culturally and historically diverse communities had to adhere to the foreign construct of a nation, represented by a homogenous culture. Not only were these identities formulated in-opposition to a foreign (modern/colonial European) culture, but in most cases resulted in a dominant culture and the erasure of a rich cultural historical diversity.

In the case of Morocco, what is considered traditional today, was largely defined under the French Protectorate (1912-56) and later endorsed by the Nationalists. The colonial power extensively documented Moroccan culture through an oriental and colonial lens to qualify Moroccan society as traditional (deprived of progress), ancestral (deprived of history), and authentic (deprived of exchange), to emphasize its difference with and inferiority to progressive modern French society, and as such, to justify its colonial politics. Meanwhile, despite the country’s cultural and religious diversity, the Nationalists prioritised the region’s Arab-Muslim heritage that provided a (religious) justification for their political domination through their (sometimes self-proclaimed) descent from the Prophet, a means to clearly distinguish from the Catholic French as well as to associate with the pan-Islamic community. Ironically, they turned to these French writings to identify and justify a traditional, ancestral and authentic Moroccan cultural heritage.

In this paper, I want to explore decolonial options for traditional/national dress histories of former colonised countries through a speculative exercise of (radically) delinking from modern/colonial storytelling. What happens when we undo modernity’s three axes of separation (Vazquez 2020) and relate these fashioning systems (back) to community (by delinking from modernity’s eurocentricity), nature (by delinking from modernity’s anthropocentricity) and history (by delinking from modernity’s contemporaneity)? Can we change narratives by introducing the term positioned relational fashion as a decolonial alternative for traditional dress, which has come to stigmatise, devalue and erase ways of body fashioning outside the contemporary fashion system?

Angela Jansen is a decolonial researcher, educator, consultant, curator and initiator of the Research Collective for Decoloniality & Fashion (RCDF). Her scholarship grows out of an effort to critique the denial and erasure of a diversity of fashioning systems due to eurocentricity, unequal global power relations based on modern-colonial order, and the Euro–American canon of normativity. In 2012, she initiated the Research Collective, an experimental platform beyond institutional, disciplinary and geographical boundaries that experiments with decentral and decolonial ways of knowledge-creation and sharing, through a global network of local fashioning communities. She is the initiator of the monthly Conversations on Decoloniality & Fashion, the yearly introductory course on Decoloniality & Fashion and the biennial Global Fashioning Assembly.