Dr. Wessie Ling is Reader in Fashion Studies at Northumbria University. A cultural historian and visual artist, she uses academic writing and visual art practice to examine cultural identities in the production of fashion and cultural property of fashion. She is the author of Fusionable Cheongsam (2007) and Co-Investigator of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, UK) project, Writing and Translating Modern Design Histories in East Asia for the Global World (2012-4), ASEAN Research Fellow at the Research Institute of Languages and Cultures of Asia (RILCA) at Mahidol University (2018) and Rita Bolland Fellow for Textile and Fashion Study at the Research Centre for Material Culture in National Museum of World Cultures, the Netherlands (2018/9). She co-edited a special issue for Modern Italy on transcultural exchange between Italy and Asia, and ZoneModa Journal on Global Fashion. She has also published in European Fashion: The Creation of a Global Industry (2018), Visual Anthropology, World Futures. The Journal of New Paradigm Research, among others. Her artworks have been exhibited in Saint Dominics Priory (2016, Newcastle Upon Tyne), Oxfordshire Visual Arts Development Agency (OVADA) (2015, Oxford), Danson House (2013, Bexleyheath), the Brunei Gallery (2012, London: SOAS), Saltram House (2012, Plymouth: National Trust) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (2011, London), 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 in books such as The Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion (2010), The Fashion History Reader (2010) and Fashion Media: Past and Present (2013). She is a member of the Editorial Board of Fashion Theory, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, The International Journal of Fashion Studies, Anthem Studies in Fashion, Dress and Visual Culture and China Matters. She has done field work in China on Sino-Italian joint ventures contributing to a collaborative study in Cultural Anthropology. In Italy she authored: Orientalismi. La moda nel mercato globale (2006), La moda. Unintroduzione (2010), Un mondo di mode (2011), Exhibit! (2017) and Biki: French Visions for Italian Fashion (2019, Italian and English edition). She curated the fashion exhibitions 80s-90s Facing Beauties: Italian Fashion and Japanese fashion at a Glance (Rimini Museum, 2013) and Jungle: The Imagery of Animals in Fashion (Torino, Venaria Reale, 2017). She is Editor in Chief of Zonemoda Journal.
This impressive book re-frames all general and many specialist understandings of Chinese fashion. It turns on its head nearly everything I was taught and have imagined about dress in China, from the period of Mao to the present day.
Peter McNeil, Distinguished Professor in Design History,
University of Technology, Sydney
Series Editors: Reina Lewis & Elizabeth Wilson
Advisory Board: Christopher Breward, Hazel Clark, Joanne Entwistle, Caroline Evans, Susan Kaiser, Angela McRobbie, Hiroshi Narumi, Peter McNeil, O zlem Sandikci, Simona Segre Reinach
Dress Cultures publishes the best international scholarship in the study of dress practices historically and in the contemporary world. Bringing into creative dialogue a wide range of approaches, titles in the series explore the aesthetic and social relationships between dress, fashion and the body. Our authors investigate dress within material culture, as a field to be explored sociologically and politically, and from the perspective of economics and local and globalised fashion industries.
Published:
Delft Blue to Denim Blue: Contemporary Dutch Fashion
edited by Anneke Smelik
Dressing for Austerity: Aspiration, Leisure and Fashion in Postwar Britain
by Geraldine Biddle-Perry
Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body
by Francesca Granata
Fashion in European Art: Dress and Identity, Politics and the Body, 17751925
edited by Justine De Young
Fashion in Multiple Chinas: Chinese Styles in the Transglobal Landscape
edited by Wessie Ling and Simona Segre
Reinach
Fashioning Indie: Popular Fashion, Music and Gender
by Rachel Lifter
Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith
edited by Reina Lewis
Niche Fashion Magazines: Changing the Shape of Fashion
by Ane Lynge-Jorln
Styling South Asian Youth Cultures: Fashion, Media and Society
edited by Lipi Begum, Rohit K. Dasgupta and Reina Lewis
Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists
edited by Agns Rocamora and Anneke Smelik
Veiling in Fashion: Space and the Hijab in Minority Communities
by Anna-Mari Almila
Wearing the Cheongsam: Dress and Culture in a Chinese Diaspora
By Cheryl Sim
Reina Lewis: reina.lewis@fashion.arts.ac.uk
Elizabeth Wilson: elizabethwilson.auth@gmail.com
Much of the thinking behind this book began from a research project entitled Writing and Translating Modern Design Histories in East Asia for the Global World (201214) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). We are indebted to principle investigator Yuko Kikuchi with whom Wessie worked closely on the project. Through exchanges and comparative studies with a group of East Asian design history scholars, we have found that plurality and multiple practices underline the development of design histories in East Asia. Embryonic ideas between us, as co-editors of this book, on a critical framework for the study of Chinese fashion in the transglobal landscape arose from a seminar on Design Histories and Design Studies in East Asia: Towards a Creation of a Global/Transnational Framework for Design Histories (2011) at the University of Brighton, funded by Design History Society. It was not until we organised a panel for the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS, 2013) on the manufacturing of new luxury in Chinese fashion that we regarded it as a new interconnecting force of the global, the transnational, and the diaspora that was worthy of a book. We are thankful to the participation of Juanjuan Wu and Xi Gu, panel members, as well as contributing authors here, and to our early conversations, which have blossomed in this volume.
As editors, we are very grateful to series editors Reina Lewis and Elizabeth Wilson for their enthusiastic response to the idea of this book. We would also like to thank Philippa Brewster at I.B.Tauris for her encouragement and effective guidance through every process, bringing the book to fruition. Our gratitude goes especially to the authors, who have patiently, constructively and promptly responded to our labourous demands and feedback. Many thanks to Angelique Neumann for her dedication to the manuscript and Rory Gormley and his team for their devoted preparation for the book launch in LaSalle, Singapore. We are most grateful for the Research Publication Grant from Design History Society (United Kingdom). Last but not least, our heartfelt thanks go to photographer Daniele Mattioli whose fantastic image is a generous gift to our book cover. We are also thankful to Maddalena Corvaglia, the celebrated model who has enlivened the cover of the volume.
