Fashionable Traditions: Asian Handmade Textiles in Motion

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Textiles play a decisive role in history: attire not only indicates status, gender, ethnicity, and religion but illustrates how such boundaries are continuously being negotiated, shifted, and recreated. Fashionable Traditions captures the complex reality of Asian handmade textile production and consumption. From traditionalist discourse and cultural authenticity to fashion and market trends, the contributors to this collection demonstrate the multilayered influence of often contradictory forces. In-depth, ethnographic case studies reveal the entangled relationships between local artisans, external interventions, and consumers, while acknowledging the broader frameworks in which such relationships are situated. Together these stories offer a vivid account of the socio-economic, political, and cultural dynamics in various parts of Asia and emphasize that fashion is neither a Western prerogative nor do its roots reside solely in the West.

Reviews

This is an intrepid anthology. Even as Asian indigenous textile makers try out a multiplicity of strategies to find a way for their art/craft to survive in the global world, the contributors to this volume explore new frameworks to describe their ingenuity. 'Fashionalization', 'modernization', 'trivialization', '(de)commodification', 'heritagization', all typify trajectories of reinvention, external mediation and experimentation. The usually unseen struggles of indigenous textile producers deserve more spokespeople like these. -- Sandra Niessen, Anthropologist
Fashionable Traditions offers significant new insights into the relationship between Asian indigenous textile cultures and their assimilation into the world of global consumption, from heritage industries to fashion. The authors bring anthropological and historical perspectives that are based on original and extensive field research. The volume adds considerably to our understanding of the multiple roles of handmade textiles in a modern world. -- Ruth Barnes, Thomas Jaffe Curator of Indo-Pacific Art, Yale University Art Gallery

For anyone interested in the changes taking place where hand-made textiles are produced, this book offers a range of insights into the processes at work. The authors have all produced intelligent, thoughtful studies that are well worth reading. This book makes a valuable contribution to knowledge about the interplay between "tradition" and "fashion" in textile production in the modern world.

Author Bio

Ayami Nakatani is professor of cultural anthropology and director of the Discovery Program for Global Learners at Okayama University.