The political culture of non-western fashion identities

The topic of non-western (or ethnic, exotic, world or fusion) fashion has been gaining traction as a legitimate field of scholarship in recent years. This rich vein of research and practice requires more attention to developing new approaches to analytic frameworks in which to evaluate the state of fashion in non-western contexts and to discuss more seamlessly the convergence and dialectical appropriation of non-western inspirations in western fashion and western inspirations in forging and negotiating non-western fashion identities. One indication of the inadequacies of current analytic frameworks used to understand non-western fashion is the use of oppositions and polarities such as colonial/postcolonial, exotic/indigenous and local/global. This article argues that non-western fashion can only be adequately unpacked and understood if the embedded politics of the cultures in which non-western emanates are recognized, drawing on the history of fashions in China and references to Chinoiserie in Eurocentric fashion.