Yangzhou's “Mondernity”: Fashion and Consumption in the Early Nineteenth Century

Finnane, Antonia

doi:10.1215/10679847-11-2-395

Cited by 15 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…They were fluid, hybrid and unstable, lubricating the global exchange of goods and cultures. Together with evidence we have of the intensely fashion conscious and reflexive outlook in some texts from early Qing China -where English cloth played an important role for selfhood (Finnane, 2003) -these accounts suggest that a reflexive interest in other cultures and in fusing material reference points is much older than tends to be recognized.…”

Section: Consuming Empires: Diversity Hybridity and Self-fashioningmentioning

confidence: 83%

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Crossing Divides

Trentmann

2009

Journal of Consumer Culture

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This article has two aims. First, it seeks to raise awareness about three competing frameworks that are currently dominating the debate about consumption and globalization: 18th-century global exchanges; Americanization; and consumerism. These have tended to operate in virtual isolation and ignorance from each other. Second, through a critical discussion of recent research, the article sets out to complicate conventional chronologies of tradition/modernity/late modernity that continue to underpin much research on consumer cultures. Instead of a linear progression from diversity to standardization, from gift-exchange to commodity-exchange, and from public engagement to privatized materialism, the article points to the dynamic interaction between these forms across time. An appreciation of these longer, deeper, and more variegated histories means that it is problematic to equate consumer culture with the `age of affluence' after the Second World War. In turn, it calls on critics of consumerism to adopt a more realistic and historically sensitive approach that engages with the longer evolution of consumer culture and avoids idealized images of a recent pre-consumerist past.

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Section: Consuming Empires: Diversity Hybridity and Self-fashioningmentioning

confidence: 83%

“…'Long skirts and wide collars, broad belts and narrow pleats -they change without warning.' They were all after 'the look of the moment'(shiyang) (Brook, 1998: 220; see also Finnane, 2003 for early Qing). The more fashionable, the better.…”

Section: Multiple Modernities: Global Network Of Consumption Before mentioning

confidence: 99%

Crossing Divides

Trentmann

2009

Journal of Consumer Culture

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“…For Lipovetsky (1994: 19), "The Japanese kimono remained un changed for centuries, while in China women's dress underwent no real transformation between the seventeenth and nineteenth centur ies." For analysis of why this view came to exist, see Finnane (2003). 6.…”

Section: A C K N O W Le D G M E N Tsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Was Fashion a European Invention?: The Kimono and Economic Development in Japan

Francks¹

2015

Fashion Theory

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It is still widely assumed that the emergence of fashion was a uniquely European phenomenon and that, conversely, non-Western clothing sys tems must have remained static and "traditional." Hence, in the case of Japan, clothing modernity continues to be equated with the adoption of Western-style dress. This article presents evidence that, through the pe riod of Japanese economic growth and industrialization from the eight eenth century to World War II, the kimono outfits that most women continued to wear were subject to a process of change that can only be understood as fashion. As a result, by the interwar period, kimono 332 P e n e lo p e F rancks fashion had become a mass-market force that continued to influence the production and consumption of dress, even as, in the postwar period, most women switched to Western-style clothing. Fashion is thus not necessarily a European invention and can represent a significant eco nomic force, even if it comes in distinctively non-European forms.KEYWORDS: Japanese fashion history, economic history of fashion, kimono, Japanese textile industry, cotton and fashion, silk and fashion

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“…Meanwhile, the use of tobacco, by both men and women, had also become widely prevalent in China by the late eighteenth century. 64 In Japan, tobacco and the practice of smoking it arrived with Spanish or Portuguese explorers at about the same time as in Europe. Smoking was first taken up by 'antisocial' elements such as kabuki actors and features in early eighteenth-century lists of prohibited activities for such groups, on the grounds that it constituted both an idle foreign practice that flouted public morals and a fire risk.…”

Section: Rice and The 'Transformation Of Desire'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Simple pleasures: food consumption in Japan and the global comparison of living standards

Francks¹

2013

Journal of Global History

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Contrary both to Pomeranz's argument for the comparability of pre-industrial living standards across Eurasia and to the accumulating evidence of the extent of growth in the Japanese economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, quantitative historical comparisons of living standards consistently place Japan on a level with the least developed parts of Europe and imply that the living conditions of ordinary Japanese people only began to approach those of the industrialized West once imported modernization had been absorbed. This article uses concepts derived from comparative consumption history to go deeper into this issue, arguing that, from at least the late eighteenth century, Japanese living standards were changing in ways that paralleled equivalent developments in Europe. Through the consumption histories of a set of ‘transformative’ products – rice, tea, tobacco, and sugar – it seeks to demonstrate the potential for comparative qualitative analysis of living standards and to show that, in Japan as in Europe, the ‘transformation of desire’ paved the way for industrialization.

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Yangzhou's “Mondernity”: Fashion and Consumption in the Early Nineteenth Century

Cited by 15 publications

References 43 publications

Crossing Divides

Crossing Divides

Was Fashion a European Invention?: The Kimono and Economic Development in Japan

Simple pleasures: food consumption in Japan and the global comparison of living standards

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