Fashioning the Decades: 100 Years of Dressing in a Chinese Diaspora
Does fashion have the power to resist, embrace, and re-invent? This exhibition highlights how Chinese Canadian women mix Chinese and Canadian fashion items to reflect their senses of inclusion, exclusion, belonging, and alienation in a Chinese diaspora. It calls the viewer’s attention to recognize fashion objects as primary storytellers to understand the richness and complexity of Chinese Canadian history.
Fashioning the Decades: 100 Years of Dressing in a Chinese Diaspora brings together nine oral history interviews with diverse artworks and cultural objects to explore the self-fashioning practices of Chinese Canadian women in the 20th and 21st centuries. It shows how these individuals have used clothing to define and express themselves in a world where discrimination is the “norm”. The interviews and objects included in this exhibition reflect how different generations of Chinese Canadian women used fashion as a powerful tool and a self-defining strategy to communicate their cultural identities and navigate two different cultures.
Fashioning the Decades: 100 Years of Dressing in a Chinese Diaspora brings together nine oral history interviews with diverse artworks and cultural objects to explore the self-fashioning practices of Chinese Canadian women in the 20th and 21st centuries. It shows how these individuals have used clothing to define and express themselves in a world where discrimination is the “norm”. The interviews and objects included in this exhibition reflect how different generations of Chinese Canadian women used fashion as a powerful tool and a self-defining strategy to communicate their cultural identities and navigate two different cultures.
