Fashioning Heritage
My Session Status
Space is also marked by clothes and cloth as people literally move from one space to another. From private to public, from profane to sacred spaces or undergoing diasporic processes, all can be expressed through fashioning the body in a way that articulates the fluidity of identity. While theses transition markers require different levels of literacy—a reading of patterns, motifs and colours, they nonetheless are representations and performances that can be for both insider and outsider audiences.
Dress is portable, as are the skills that are required to craft bodies. As communities indeed move around the globe, it raises the questions of how does a community imagine itself. What does it require to construct its identity, both tangible and intangible, through dress practices?
The aim of the session is to promote the discussion of the politics of dress and the role of the fashioned body in heritage. Thinking about heritage through fashion has been the domain of folkloric studies. However, since Jennifer Craik’s ground-breaking book The Face of Fashion (1994), there has been a steep rise in critical studies in fashion theory and interest in the politics of dress. When we write about fashion we tend to discuss individuality, as a personal act, here the intention is to discuss identity, community and relationships through clothing. This clothing may often be considered as cultural heritage items hence often locating the wearer in a particular political framework. Categorization is deeply political. In teasing out these issues, which may seem like boundaries, no doubt papers will find that there are ambiguous boundaries which unravel between the body and the cloth.
Topics to be considered are:
• Transitional dress as narratives of change;
• Crafting heritage and community development;
• Inclusion and exclusion in dress practices;
• Fragmented communities brought together through dress;
• Social cohesion and civic engagement through dress;
• Gender and dress.
Sub Sessions
In 2001 a massive earthquake devastated Kutch, the largest district in the Indian state of Gujarat. Beyond the incomprehensible loss of life and property, the impact on the cultural heritage of the region was, and continues to be profound. Following the earthquake, the state Government has sought, with increasing enthusiasm, to “develop” the region, introducing schemes to attract investment—in particular large manufacturers of cement, power, auto parts, and chemicals. Another prong involve...
This paper will examine heritage fashioned through dress in a study of the “Red River coat,” a garment that through various permutations was worn for over a century in Canada. Those who remember it know it as a girl’s navy blue wool hooded coat with red piping in the seams, red-trimmed épaulettes, always worn with a red tuque, mittens, and sash belt, and sometimes a pair of red wool leggings. They also recall its ubiquity in school cloakrooms. Over its century of history with that name, it...
In this paper, I will examine how heritage management creates historical gender and the way they “dress up” the past. By critically investigating contemporary and historical visual representations of people from the Viking Age, I will show how contemporary displays of historical gender through clothes and attributes harmonize with modern gender systems, just as much as historical. Considering heritage a process and a contemporary product, I will discuss the meaning of gender in today’s her...
Each year from 1993 in Seattle until 2010 in Yokohama, the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group met, and a political “fancy dress” was designed to be worn by each head of state for the formal photograph. The official pictorial documents are termed “family photos” in the journalist jargon. The dress was deemed to reflect the heritage of the host nation. Clothing ranged from Canadian leather bomber jackets, Chilean ponchos, Indonesian Batik to Australian “Driza-bone” coats. In 2011...