6 Soft power
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Kristen Loring Brennan
Abstract
When the Chinese designer, Guo Pei (b. 1967), catapulted into the world of Parisian haute couture, critics embraced her embellished styles and grand scale of production – a match of materials and labor that seemed possible only in China. They pondered her bold leap over the austerity of the Mao years to the iconography of imperial China. Such romanticism reinvigorated discourses of Orientalism, a cause further amplified by celebrity clients and museum exhibitions. However, the project of disentangling her work from its audiences has obscured a broader issue: Guo Pei’s pivotal role as a woman designing global fashion. This chapter explores Guo Pei’s fascination with two muses, the Qing dynasty Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908) and the contemporary American model, Carmen Dell’Orefice (b. 1931), as an alternative to the femme fatale presented in fashion from the nineteenth century through the present. Rather than portraying the woman as a sexualized commodity or cunning consumer, Guo Pei’s designs visualize power as an amassing of resources and relationships. Coupled with theatrical imagery, her works invert the ephemeral world of fashion’s femme fatale and challenge notions of age and tradition as antiquated. By leveraging dignity and dominance through soft power, Guo Pei offers an image of a woman of means – a matriarch who defines history.
Abstract
When the Chinese designer, Guo Pei (b. 1967), catapulted into the world of Parisian haute couture, critics embraced her embellished styles and grand scale of production – a match of materials and labor that seemed possible only in China. They pondered her bold leap over the austerity of the Mao years to the iconography of imperial China. Such romanticism reinvigorated discourses of Orientalism, a cause further amplified by celebrity clients and museum exhibitions. However, the project of disentangling her work from its audiences has obscured a broader issue: Guo Pei’s pivotal role as a woman designing global fashion. This chapter explores Guo Pei’s fascination with two muses, the Qing dynasty Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908) and the contemporary American model, Carmen Dell’Orefice (b. 1931), as an alternative to the femme fatale presented in fashion from the nineteenth century through the present. Rather than portraying the woman as a sexualized commodity or cunning consumer, Guo Pei’s designs visualize power as an amassing of resources and relationships. Coupled with theatrical imagery, her works invert the ephemeral world of fashion’s femme fatale and challenge notions of age and tradition as antiquated. By leveraging dignity and dominance through soft power, Guo Pei offers an image of a woman of means – a matriarch who defines history.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- List of figures vii
- List of contributors xv
- Introduction 1
- I Fashioning identity 23
- 1 Wearing a gendered tree 25
- 2 Women for cotton and men for wool 47
- 3 Gendered blue 72
- 4 Bhutanese women and the performance of globalization 92
- 5 Weaving and dyeing the ideal of reproduction among Shidong Miao in Guizhou province 113
- II Gendering creative agency 133
- 6 Soft power 135
- 7 Investigating female entrepreneurship in silk weaving in contemporary Cambodia 158
- 8 (Re)crafting distribution networks for contemporary Philippine textiles 180
- 9 Women weaving silken identities and revitalizing various Japanese textile traditions 207
- III Creative voices for change 229
- 10 Entangled histories of craft and conflict 231
- 11 The politics of wastefulness and ‘the poetics of waste’ 258
- 12 Made in Rana Plaza 284
- Index 312
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- List of figures vii
- List of contributors xv
- Introduction 1
- I Fashioning identity 23
- 1 Wearing a gendered tree 25
- 2 Women for cotton and men for wool 47
- 3 Gendered blue 72
- 4 Bhutanese women and the performance of globalization 92
- 5 Weaving and dyeing the ideal of reproduction among Shidong Miao in Guizhou province 113
- II Gendering creative agency 133
- 6 Soft power 135
- 7 Investigating female entrepreneurship in silk weaving in contemporary Cambodia 158
- 8 (Re)crafting distribution networks for contemporary Philippine textiles 180
- 9 Women weaving silken identities and revitalizing various Japanese textile traditions 207
- III Creative voices for change 229
- 10 Entangled histories of craft and conflict 231
- 11 The politics of wastefulness and ‘the poetics of waste’ 258
- 12 Made in Rana Plaza 284
- Index 312
