Fashion Theory

This special issue calls for contributions to knowledge on fashion and modernity in Taiwan, where academic attention remains mostly absent in the anglosphere.

From a geopolitical perspective, Taiwan and its peoples have existed awkwardly for the past century and a half within liminal spaces of abstract nationhood and ambiguous sovereignty effected by contentious government regime changes that culminated in decades of martial-law authoritarianism imposed by the Kuomintang following the Republic of China’s evacuation from the Chinese mainland in 1949. And yet amidst the sobering realities of this period emerged a heightened milieu of immense creative and artistic expression that continues to underpin the visibility of distinctive subjectivities so essential to the island’s collective psyche. By extension, the ongoing development of Taiwan’s overall cultural identity can be furthermore correlated to the permeation of modern fashion practices in its society, where the situatedness of dress, bodies, and spaces still inform and interpret the changing modalities of fashionability in the Taiwanese everyday.

This special issue will highlight the richness of cultural output pertaining to Taiwanese urban life and the cosmopolitan, beginning in the Japanese colonial era to now. Of particular interest to this special issue are historical investigations and new contributions to primary source knowledge that advance critical understandings of fashion and modernity in the narrativizing of cultural identity. Specifically, this special issue welcomes contributions that focus on fashion research relevant to Taiwan in areas such as, but not limited to:

• photography; documentary and reportage, portraiture and commercial, art and experimental photography
• cinema and moving image; impact of martial law censorship, government propaganda
• written and oral literature; fiction, ephemera and periodicals, linguistics
• theatre, performance, and music; subcultures
• ethnicity, indigeneity, class, and gender; tensions, distinctions
• cultural memory and trauma; revisions and reappropriations
• modernity, urban life, and the street; promenades, movement, public and private spaces

Please email your expression of interest and intention to submit a full paper to the guest editor with the title of your paper, the authors, and an abstract of no more than 300 words before the stated abstract submission deadline.

Full paper submissions are also welcome without an expression of interest before the stated full paper submission deadline.

Instructions for AuthorsSubmit an Article