Fashioning Modernity:Changing Meanings of Clothing in Colonial Korea

‘Modernity’ encompasses a multitude of concepts and definitions. This article take a material marker of modernity - clothing - and uses it as an analytic prism to examine the changes in social, economic, and political arenas and discourses of Korea’s colonial period (1910-1945). I analyze the meanings of clothing in specific contexts such as: the contemporary re-association of Korean ethnic identity with ‘traditional’ clothes; the beginnings of change in the language of clothes; the utility and limits of the standard colonial oppression-resistance binary; transformations in socio-economic structure; and the diffusion of visual technology and constructions of gender in multiplying sartorial selection and meaning. KCI Citation Count: 3