Fashion and Upheaval: Bottom-up Creations of Intimacies in East Asia

Abstract

In this thesis, I explore the East Asian spaces of colonial Shanghai and Hong Kong in the early 1940s, Tokyo’s Harajuku street scene in the late 1990s, and the emergence of paepi on the street-fashion scene at Seoul’s Dongdaemun Design Complex within the last decade. These are all spaces that, amidst various forms of cultural upheaval, have engendered a wildly creative and culturally mixed fashion scene. The fashion scene mediates the shifting realities by engendering new modes for expressing the self, and for relating to others. In these communities that try to reject the cultural dominance of global and local forms of capitalism, I explore the creative dynamics which reveal a unique space, in which relationships are built through fashion to assert a resistive identity and intimacy.