Nicolas Cambridge: Post-Modern Boy, Post-Modern Girl: the Orientalisation of Japanese fashion
London College of Fashion
The paper offers a practitioner’s perspective on Western representations of avant-garde fashion, with particular reference to the reception of Japanese-designed clothing and its impact on the topography of the fashion landscape of the United Kingdom between 1981-2005. An introductory section sets out the historical context to consumption of Japan by the West, including material pertaining to a ‘cult of Japan’ that arose in the late nineteenth century, the Japan-Britain Exhibition of 1910 and recent cultural exchanges between the two countries in the form of exhibitions and festivals.
The presentation focuses on critical readings of fashion spreads culled from style magazines, highlighting particular trajectories existing in the mediated imagery of the Western fashion press. Together with the perspective taken by journalistic and academic approaches to Japanese fashion design, such images appear to construct an essentialist trope. However, analysis of visual representations, promotional materials and artefacts suggests that Japanese designers are themselves complicit in the process of fashioning ‘Oriental’ identities. Their mobilisations of traditional techniques as creative strategies produce outcomes exploited within the Western canon of fashion representation in its interrogation of problematic cultural categories. In mapping this contested site, a gender-specific dichotomy is identified and the cultural negotiations taking place theorised as demonstrating the existence of a neo-Orientalist strand in the discourse of fashion.
The conclusion critiques the characterisation of Japanese fashion design within Western critical thought as manifestations of an unfathomable Eastern æsthetic. Valorisations of the designer as auteur –creator of challenging garments often consumed in a curatorial context – are counter-balanced by an essentialist reception afforded the minimalist outputs of apparel companies working in a more recognisably Western sartorial idiom. Examination of contemporary fashion labels, less creatively constrained by either by the ballast of traditional cultural heritage or by commercial concerns, uncovers a range of differentiated creative trajectories, suggesting the existence of a ‘creative continuum’ of design that currently informs constructions of Japanese identity in the United Kingdom.
Nicolas Cambridge, LondonCollege of Fashion