Fashion and Translation: Britain, Japan, China, Korea

This project will form a new network to examine the role of clothing fashions as a powerful and pervasive cultural intermediary between Britain, Japan, China and Korea. Fashion crosses and confounds geographical boundaries in a myriad of ways, and yet notions of Britishness, Chineseness and Japaneseness remain central to the dynamics of fashionable dress as cultural expression. This year, Tokyo Fashion Week hosted the first Japanese Tweed Run, a bicycling event that celebrates nostalgic notions of British eccentricity through the motif of traditional tweed. Meanwhile, in Britain, the prime-time television drama Doctor Who has drawn harsh criticism for dressing its hero in an acrylic-mix fake Harris tweed jacket manufactured in China. Fashion design often uses the 'exotic' as a reliable source of novelty and luxury, but an item of fashionable clothing can be designed in one hemisphere, manufactured in another, and retailed globally while maintaining a brand identity attached to nation. British high-street chain Marks and Spencer and the Japanese label Uniqlo have multiple stores in China. Both of these brands have also recently been joined on London's Oxford Street by Chinese store Bosideng who are set to create the first tangible presence of Chinese high street fashion in Britain. In China, the influence of Korean fashion is also increasing and threatens to displace the position of Japan as a style leader in some fashion sectors. Internet shopping and fashion blogging further calls into question the significance of national borders, while promoting highly distinct European and East Asian identities.
The last decade has also seen a sea change in fashion studies. Western forms of fashion within non-western contexts are being reconsidered to produce new readings of fashion as a far less geographically contingent vehicle for individuality, cosmopolitanism, ethnicity, and global networks of money, goods and ideas. East Asian fashion is recognised as 'speaking' to British consumers as European fashion has 'spoken' to East Asia. The network that we are proposing draws on UK and internationally based academics, artists, museum curators and fashion industry professionals who will work together to produce a new understanding of transnational fashion exchange as an agent of cultural translation.
In three themed workshops, the network will forge new relations between fashion academics, fashion professionals, artists and museum collection managers, in creative interdisciplinary dialogues that connect concepts of fashion, brand identity and actual fashion garments. The critical focus and network membership across the national boundaries of Britain, Japan, China and Korea will increase understanding of fashion translations from non-UK perspectives and create long-lasting knowledge exchanges at an international level, with gains for industry and commerce as well as fashion studies. The benefits will include knowledge and skills exchange across disciplinary and national boundaries to improve understanding and rejuvenate the conceptualisation and practice of fashion across the international academic community, third sector and private sector. We will further develop and disseminate new directions in fashion studies by authoring a special issue of a leading peer-reviewed journal and will develop a website that makes our activities and findings accessible to students, the fashion industry and the wider public. We will also lay the foundations for a substantial larger project. Our reference points of Britain, Japan, China and Korea will serve as starting points from which to set a future research agenda on global transnational fashion exchange.

This network will benefit the third sector (fashion museums and institutions), the commercial private sector (fashion industry), and the wider public. Its effects will increase understanding across national, cultural and disciplinary boundaries, counter cultural stereotypes of East and West, enhance the creative and cultural economy, and augment business opportunity. Dynamic workshop exchanges between academics, museum and fashion professionals will maximise the communication of skill sets and knowledge, and showcase the unique resources of particular stakeholders within the network. For example, increased knowledge of the holdings of fashion collections contributes to the scope of future research and provides an invaluable resource for artists and the fashion industry. Critical academics engagements with cross-cultural fashion exchange increases understanding of cultural dynamics and social responsibility within the fashion industry and fashion business, while industry practitioners expose academic and museum practitioners to economic and merchandising factors that are crucial in understanding fashion today. Artists and designers pose challenging questions and provide provocative responses to issues of fashion and cultural identity. Academics also provide detailed historical contexts and theoretical frameworks for fashion which museum professionals can use to better situate their collections.

Fashion collection specialists will form an important part of this transnational network. Curators whose research and collections are informed by cultural exchange between East Asia and Britain and within East Asia have already agreed to be network participants and speakers. These include: Tamami Suoh and Akiko Fukai (Kyoto Costume Institute), Anna Jackson and Pauline Lemoigne (Victoria and Albert Museum) and Alexandra Palmer (Royal Ontario Museum). The work of these curators informs the display and interpretation of fashion in important public museums, contributing to increased public awareness of inter-cultural issues in fashion. Curators also shape the collecting policies of these key institutions, with regard to contemporary East Asian fashion and inter-cultural exchange in fashion garments. This embeds the social impact of the network's thematic focus still further, supports future study in this area for fashion designers, and increases future opportunities for public exhibitions.

The industry-based members of our network will also extend our impact into the private sector. The 2012 Autumn/Winter collection of Dries van Noten is a recent high profile haute couture example of how fashion designers use museum textile collections to innovate. Van Noten's study of Chinese, Japanese and Korean garments at the Victoria and Albert Museum fed directly into the production of a new collection that has had wide fashion and popular media coverage. Commitments to our network have already received from: Ted Young-Ing, former Senior Designer at Gucci and art director and founder of the Tweed Run that exploits Britishness with cultural and fashion events in Japan and Britain; Christine Tsui, a fashion merchandiser in mainland China, who is researching contemporary Chinese fashion and seeks to set up an archive of East Asian fashion designers for the use of academic and industry researchers; and Pernille Rudlin who, as European representative for Japan Intercultural Consulting, works with Japanese fashion companies such as ASICS and Uniqlo to facilitate European/East Asian business interactions though greater inter-cultural understanding. Workshop speakers such as these, and other fashion industry professionals who have registered their interest in participation in our network, will provide another means by which the network's activities will enhance the research capacity, knowledge and skills of businesses, and contribute towards wealth creation as well as public awareness and understanding of the societal issues of cultural exchange.