Fashion in Multiple Chinas: Chinese Styles in the Transglobal Landscape

Description

Much has been written about the transformation of China from being a clothing-manufacturing site to a fast-rate fashion consuming society. Less, however, has been written on the process of making Chinese fashion. The expert contributors to Fashion in Multiple Chinas explore how the many Chinese fashions operate across the widespread, fragmented and diffused, Chinese diaspora. They confront the idea of Chinese nationalism as `one nation', as well as of China as a single reality, in revealing the realities of Chinese fashion as diverse and comprising multiple practices. They also demonstrate how the making of Chinese fashion is composed of numerous layers, often involving a web of global entanglements between manufacturing and circulation, retailing and branding. They cover the mechanics of the PRC fashion industry, the creative economy of Chinese fashion, its retail and branding, and the cultural identity of Chinese fashion from the diasporas comprising the transglobal landscape of fashion production.

Wessie Ling is a Reader in Fashion Studies at Northumbria University and a practising visual artist. She is the author of Fusionable Cheongsam and has written on Chinese fashion for Berg Encyclopedia of East Asian Design. She has contributed to journals such as Visual Anthropology, Journal for the Study of British Cultures and Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture. In 2018, she is ASEAN Research Fellow at Mahidol University and Rita Bolland Fellow for the Study of Textile and Fashion at Tropenmuseum. Her artworks have been exhibited at OVADA in Oxford, at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, and at the Victoria & Albert Museum among others. Simona Segre Reinach is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor of Fashion Studies at Bologna University. She has written extensively on fashion from a global perspective including contributions to Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion and The Fashion History Reader. She has written for journals including Fashion Theory, Fashion Practice, and The International Journal of Fashion Studies. She sits on the Editorial Board of Fashion Theory, The International Journal of Fashion Studies and Critical Studies on Fashion and Beauty. She also curated the exhibitions 80s-90s Facing Beauties. Italian Fashion and Japanese Fashion At A Glance at the Museo della citta di Rimini and Jungle. The animal imagery in Fashion at Venaria Reale in Torino.