The Fold of Fashion
Resource
中外文學, 42(4), 015-050
Journal
中外文學
Journal Volume
42
Journal Issue
4
Pages
015-050
Date Issued
2013-12
Date
2013-12
Author(s)
Abstract
The fold has become one of the key concepts in theorizing the mutability
and contingency of history as marvelously demonstrated in Walter Benjamin’s
The Arcades Project and Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold. This paper attempts to
connect the fold (or pleats) in clothing with the fold in philosophy to map
out a creative assemblage that helps to shed new light on both contemporary
critical theory and fashion studies. It takes the historical case of dress reform
in colonial Taiwan in which the modern Chinese-style cheongsam (qipao)
was demanded by the colonial authority to be “folded” into a Western-style
dress as a point of departure to theorize history itself as a folding process. The
paper is divided into three major parts. Part I tries to negotiate a conceptual
connectivity of the fold between Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze to
foreground how the “folding forces” of differentiation traverse the “unfolded
forms” of differenciation and also how history itself is disclosed as an incessant
process of “folding, unfolding, refolding.” Part II argues that the “cheongsamdress
(Western one-piece)” in the 1920s was linked topologically as having
always already been folded and unfolded in history by the force of modernity
as maximizing the moving speed and minimizing the gender difference. Part
III attempts to displace the “integration of the Chinese and the Western”
model long promulgated in the (post)colonial sartorial analysis with a different
conceptualization of the “folding of the Chinese and the Western” in which
a topological thinking of fashion can substitute successfully for the typological
thinking of the historical costume studies.
Subjects
縐摺，時尚研究，旗袍，洋裝，形式，行勢，拓樸學，殖民現代性
fold, fashion studies, cheongsam (qipao), western dress, form, force,
topology, colonial modernity
topology, colonial modernity
Type
journal article