Speaker
Description
Stephen Greenblatt has elaborated that “a vital global cultural discourse (then) is quite ancient" (6) and not a recent phenomenon. Furthermore, Arjun Appadurai’s theory of global cultural flows proposes the idea of different “scapes”. All cultures and societies manifest these “scapes” and the fluidity of their flow indicates a new face of the world where geographical boundaries becomes inconsequential. One of these scapes is “ethnoscapes” (“the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guestworkers and other moving groups and persons,”(297). Movement of people conditions their ideas and the ideas, in turn, affect their movement. This paper would cogitate the idea of “ethnoscapes” in respect of fashion and explore a specific form of fashion as an effect and expression of cultural mobility by showing examples of designs by certain fashion designers/artists living in diaspora. The term ‘diasporic designs’ is being used since these designs manifests the narratives of mobility/migration of them as well as their culture. Like all other phenomena, present fashion system cannot and shouldn’t be studied by alienating it from globalisation. First, the paper would discuss the narratives and the stories of diasporic nostalgia connected to the sense of rootedness, embedded in the fashion designs as well as the description (or the accompanying text, what Roland Barthes calls “anchorage”) of these designs.
Secondly, the paper would explore the cultural mobility manifested in fashion through a decolonial standpoint by discussing how the clothing which is essentially western or of the coloniser’s culture is being used and mutated by the colonised, hence becoming the very expression of resistance. Finally, the paper would examine if this form of fashion underscores eco- consciousness or if there are any designs with the motifs on the clothing that promulgates the motives of environmental concerns
Biography
Gurpreet is pursuing her PhD from Panjab University, Chandigarh. Her doctoral research is focused on the nuanced study of the convergence of three areas - fashion, culture & diaspora/diasporic studies. The research explores diasporic sentiments in fashion designs and the sentiments behind the inspiration. It looks at the hybridity in fashion designs from diasporic point of view. She has recently presented papers in 23rd International Melow Conference (held in October 2023) and in a National Seminar (Chandigarh Language Congress) on the theme Towards a Comparative Cosmopolis: Language, Culture and Hybridity held in February 2024.
