Fashion in Multiple Chinas

This talk introduces the volume Fashion in Multiple Chinas: Chinese Styles in the Transglobal Landscape (London: IB Tauris). 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 on the process of making Chinese fashion. Fashion in Multiple Chinas explores how the many Chinese fashions operate across the widespread, fragmented and diffused, Chinese diaspora. It confronts 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. Demonstrated within is 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.

Dr Wessie Ling, co-editor of Fashion in Multiple Chinas, will present the framework of studying Chinese fashion in the transglobal landscape and discuss its relation to the study of Global Fashion and the extent to which such a framework can be adopt to curatoring/narrating artefacts from the distant world.

Dr. Wessie Ling is a Reader in Fashion Studies at Northumbria University and a practicing 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 (Bangkok) and Rita Bolland Fellow for the Study of Textile and Fashion at the Research Center for Material Culture (The Netherlands). Her artworks have been exhibited at OVADA in Oxford, Brunei Gallery, SOAS, Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum among others.

www.wessieling.com