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Fashioning Status: Making Meaning through Dress and Adornment across Asia

Sun, April 3, 10:45am to 12:45pm, Washington State Convention Center, Floor: 6th Floor, Room 603

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Across Asia, costume has historically conveyed political and social status, religious affiliation or apotropaic functionality, and adherence or exception to social norms. Such meanings were easily understood within the specific cultural contexts in which costumes were worn, and this panel will strive to recover these significations. We attempt to define the form and significance of adornment and dress to attain a more complete picture of the interconnections between visual, social, political, and religious landscapes. We seek to understand the functions of clothing and accessories and their pictorial representations, performed in political, courtly, and religious settings at particular moments throughout Asia. This panel studies how ideas about costume travelled across time and space. We will specifically examine how costume and adornment were interpreted and reinterpreted in different contexts, how costume from nomadic societies reconfigured in sedentary empires with long traditions of court dress, how functional adornment became status-granting objects, and how the religious significance of textiles was understood in different contexts across Asia. In discussing these issues, this panel looks to reinvigorate debates about the use, production, and circulation of costume and textiles in pre-modern Asia.

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