Lauren De-Ath, Yarwood Grant Winner 2015

In 2015, Lauren De-Ath, an MA History and Culture of Fashion student at the London College of Fashion was awarded the Yarwood Research Grant for her research on ‘Roaming Dragons: Vestiary Processes and Practices of 20th Century British Chinese Migration, 1880-1970’.

Lauren shared this report with us:

Roaming Dragons” had two ambitious research aims sprung from omissions in wider scholarship on British Chinese cultural practice. This dissertation sought to rectify this by analysing dress and the act of dressing within twentieth-century diaspora. Our primary aim was to tackle the pressing peripheralisation of British Chinese from diasporic and postcolonial academia, and cultural studies; and, secondly, argue a case for dress as an important tool of cross-cultural adaption and cultural learning, what we term ‘sartorial assimilation’.

Given my interests in the psychosocial components of dress, I became increasingly interested in how the dressed body operates when in transition and faced with indeterminable culture clashes. The proximity of clothing to the human form as an extension of their personality enables us to critically situate the ‘cultural stranger’; a person for whom a new host society remains alien and uncharted, and host culture, as the rules of the game, unlearnt. Our cultural stranger and empirical focus is the ethnic Chinese who migrated to Britain throughout the twentieth-century, with an emphasis on the female Chinese experience. At times, we also pulled from North American-Chinese sources to serve as a comparison and support to our BritishChinese theories. Our hypothesis was that merging and morphing dress habits were linked to spiritual and ideological changes that could be read as the person adapted and responded to ‘foreign’ culture and society around them.

Research laid bare the vestiary processes and practices of Chinese migration to Britain, outlining three stages from sartorial preparation, arrival and assimilation. Using historic archival data and extended interviews with Chinese women who migrated to Britain from 1950-1970 the research highlighted how for diasporic Chinese throughout the twentieth-century, dress has played an important role in the migration and resettlement process. During Edwardian times, dress acted as a protective, objective tool to circumvent negative attention in the wake of anti-Chinese racism. As these waves of Sinophobia lapsed after World War II, the cultural climate permitted a more selfreflexive use of dress. Via interviews we learnt that for many Chinese women migration afforded them more comparative social and cultural freedoms than their hometowns. Women responded largely positively to the socio-cultural opportunities afforded them by ‘egalitarian’ Britain and dress subsequently reflected a burgeoning individualism that was suppressed in more kin-based, collectivistic societies. This included the creation of an intercultural ‘British-Chinese style’ that reflected an ‘archive’ of migratory experiences.

Receiving the Yarwood Jubilee Award meant that I was not only able to hire a translator and travel around the UK to interview British Chinese women about their experiences, but undertake an international trip. Whilst this research was nominally about ‘everyday’ dress, it also covered the uses of traditional attire in reiterating cultural heritage otherwise threatened by diaspora. To understand the importance of the cheongsam to firstgeneration migrant Chinese, it was pertinent to travel to Toronto, Canada to interview the surviving family members of the Kwok Sun Silk Company- the only traditional Chinese tailors in the west- where through oral testimony we assessed why and how traditional clothes were an important fixture of migratory Chinese culture. By comparing to earlier periods where adopting host attire was a necessity to avoid assault, the rise of the cheongsam paralleled the rising ‘Yellow Power’ movement and declining Sinophobia. Due to the sensitivity of the topic, this interview was only granted provided I flew to Canada- and was thus impossible to achieve without the support and validation of the Costume Society.