Artful Decoloniality: The Politics of Fashion as Art in 20th and 21st Century Vietnam

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.

Keywords:

• National costume
• decoloniality
• de-westernization
• gender
• Vietnam

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Zoe Butt, Dolla Merrillees, and Thủy Nguyễn for inviting them to contribute to programming for the exhibition, “Thủy Nguyễn – Mộng Bình Thường/An Everyday Dream.” We are grateful to Pattaratorn Chirapravati and Greg M. Kim-Ju for the invitation that sparked our collaboration and for their comments on an earlier version of this article. We also benefited from Leshkowich’s participation in a series of conversations organized by the Research Collective for Decoloniality and Fashion and from the insights provided by two anonymous peer reviewers. Nguyen’s research was supported by the Fulbright-Hays DDRA, and UC Berkeley’s Graduate Division and History Department.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All translations from Vietnamese are by the authors.

2 The term “aó dài” has become associated with a garment with very specific characteristics: a form-fitting tunic slit up the sides worn over loose trousers, often with raglan sleeves and mandarin collar. Contemporary designers and tailors often reinterpret this basic form, such as modifying the sleeves, collar, embellishment, and flap length, but it remains recognizable through the lengthened silhouette and trousers. While the Lemur garments are technically precursors to aó dài, rather than aó dài in their most iconic physical form, we use this term for the sake of convenience to signal the direct—and widely recognized—genealogical link between Lemur and Thủy Nguyễn’s garments. Our usage also highlights how, over the past century, the development of garments that would ultimately become the iconic “áo dài” has focused on representing Vietnamese national identity through women’s clothed bodies.

3 Mignolo and Vazquez (2013) signal this distinction orthographically as “aestheTic” versus “aestheSis.”

4 For example, late 17th-century Parisian women’s demand for a “Chinese coat” was a key impetus for the emergence of casualwear and modern fashion (DeJean 2005, cited in Tu 2011, 99–100).

5 Toby Slade argues that Asian modernities envision alternative futures that may not require the radical delinking called for by Mignolo and other decolonial theorists based in Latin America (Slade 2020, 841).

6 Peter Lee calls for seeing “East and West as essentially part of one larger connected and complex world. We have to stop the caricatures and the blank generalizations, and embrace the many complex facets and commonalities in both East and West” (Fu 2020, 966).

7 Toby Slade makes this observation about contemporary Japan (Slade 2020, 838).

8 For scholars who have questioned and revised the idea of the great divide in subsequent years, see Chowrimootoo (2018) and Townsend, Trott, and Davies (2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Martina Thucnhi Nguyen

Martina Thucnhi Nguyen is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Baruch College, City University of New York. An historian of modern Southeast Asia, her research focuses on colonialism, intellectual life, social and political reform, and gender in twentieth century Vietnam. Her first book, On Our Own Strength: The Self-Reliant Literary Group and Cosmopolitan Nationalism in Late Colonial Vietnam (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021) was published as part of Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Studies Institute book series. She is currently working on her second book, a gender history of how Vietnamese during the late colonial period actively constructed ideologies of sexual difference and wove these gendered categories into the very fabric of Vietnamese national identity. [email protected]

Ann Marie Leshkowich

Ann Marie Leshkowich is Professor of Anthropology at College of the Holy Cross. She researches gender, economic transformation, class, fashion, and social work in Vietnam. She is author of Essential Trade: Vietnamese Women in a Changing Marketplace (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014; awarded the Harry J. Benda Prize, Association for Asian Studies, 2016) and coeditor of Traders in Motion: Identities and Contestations in the Vietnamese Marketplace (Cornell University Press, 2018), Neoliberalism in Vietnam (positions: asia critique, 2012), and Re-Orienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress (Berg, 2003). Her research has been published in American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, and Fashion Theory.