Abstract

Drawing on two case studies of designers whose work centered on the Vietnamese aó dài, one from the 1930s and the other the 2010s–2020s, this article considers how desires to construe fashion as art and the designer as fine artist have been implicated in transnational circuits of symbolic and material value, as well as colonial and postcolonial power relations. While decolonial scholarship on fashion has called for attention to diverse dress practices that are external to modernity and coloniality, this article argues that artist-designers’ demands for recognition of Vietnamese dress within universalizing systems of fashion and art can also constitute a decolonial move because they highlight the plurality at the heart of fashion’s aesthetic and material regime. At the same time, the designers’ creative processes often grapple with internalized discourses of essentialized Vietnamese identities that have emerged within a patriarchal context and have tended to deploy the clothed bodies of women. In simultaneously positioning their fashion as art and asserting an essentialized national identity, Vietnamese designers in different temporal contexts have both constituted and challenged the ideological and material contours of the raced, gendered, and classed hierarchies of modernity, coloniality, and fashion.

摘要

借鉴以越南aó dài为中心的设计师的两个案例研究一篇来自 1930 年代，另一篇来自 2010 年代至 2020 年代，本文探讨了将时尚视为艺术、将设计师视为优秀艺术家的愿望如何与象征和物质价值的跨国循环以及殖民和后殖民权力关系有关。尽管关于时尚的非殖民性学术研究呼吁关注现代性和殖民性之外的多样化着装实践，但本文认为，艺术家设计师要求在时尚和艺术的普遍体系中承认越南服装也可以构成一种非殖民性举措，因为它们强调时尚审美和物质体系核心的多元化。同时，设计师的创作过程经常与越南本质身份的内在话语作斗争，这些身份在父权制背景下出现，并倾向于部署女性的着装身体。在将时尚定位为艺术并主张本质化的民族身份的同时，越南设计师在不同的时间背景下构建并挑战了现代性、殖民性和时尚的种族、性别和阶级等级制度的意识形态和物质轮廓。