Mo Shi
Fashioning Chinese History: The Condition of Chinese Fashion Archives in the 21st Century
Summary
Key words: Fashion, Archive, History, China, the 21st Century
Abstract
What is an archive? Canadian archivist Terry Cook portrayed the archive as a ‘ “house of memory” ’, and through it, ‘society may be nursed to healthy and creative maturity’.[1] British archivist Louise Craven suggested that archives represent memory, history and order.[2] However, the functions and purposes of an archive are not fixed - they are malleable and transmutable. A fashion archive is one type of archive possessing the major features that Cook and Craven described, yet in the fashion industry it plays several differing roles. China can be considered a relative latecomer within the competitive global fashion market, as it first developed into a major manufacturing centre in the 1980s. It’s only since the mid-1990s that Chinese brands have started to encompass more elements of the global fashion industry, and within this new environment fashion archives are steadily developing.
This project addresses the archive, and asks the following main research questions: How are Chinese fashion professionals writing their own history through the creation and use of archives? If archives represent memory, history and order, how do Chinese fashion professionals understand history through fashion archives? This project will use interviews with a range of Shanghai fashion professionals to unravel the definitions and roles of fashion archives within the contemporary Chinese fashion system, leading to an understanding of the conditions within which fashion archives are emerging in China. This reevaluation of the nature of the archives may help to reveal the logic of history and memory making in the Chinese fashion system.
[1] Terry Cook, “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas since 1989, and the Future Paradigm Shift”, Archivaria, The Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists 43 (Spring 1997), pp.17-63
[2] Louise Craven, ‘ From the Archivist’s Cardigan to the Very Dead Sheep: What are Archives? What are Archivists? What do They Do?’, in What are Archives? Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives: A Reader, ed. by
Louise Craven (London: Routledge, 2017) pp.7-30.
