Framing Fashionability: Clothing, Identity, and the Hybrid Aesthetic of Interwar Japan
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article re-examines the modern girl (moga) in interwar Japan by focusing on the evolving role of clothing within fashion culture. While most scholarship positions youfuku (Western-style clothing) as the sole marker of modernity, this article argues that kimono remained a central and actively reimagined element of moga identity. Drawing on theories of fashion history and postcolonial hybridity, I show how clothing was a tool through which women negotiated new social roles and embodied hybrid identities. This study moves beyond the elite representations of moga in advertising and film to explore the material practices of ordinary women. Through case studies of two interwar women’s magazines—Fujin Gahō and Shufu no Tomo—the article demonstrates how visual and textual media shaped the everyday aesthetics and aspirations of working-and middle-class women. Primary sources including oral histories and magazine surveys reveal that hybrid dress was not just an elite phenomenon but a widespread cultural negotiation. Whether through department store displays, magazine sewing patterns, or repurposed kimono, women blended Japanese and Western styles in ways that reflected conformity and creativity. By highlighting these underexplored forms of participation and reception, this article contributes a more inclusive and materially grounded account of fashion modernity in Japan. It challenges persistent binaries of East/West and tradition/modernity, and offers new insight into how clothing mediated identity formation during a period of rapid cultural transformation.
DOI: 10.69648/xrha7317
Author: Erica Tso
Language: English
Subfield: Museology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7125780506