Fashionable Traditions

Book excerpt: Textiles play a decisive role in history: attire not only indicates status, gender, ethnicity, and religion but illustrates how such boundaries are continuously being negotiated, shifted, and recreated. Fashionable Traditions captures the complex reality of Asian handmade textile production and consumption. From traditionalist discourse and cultural authenticity to fashion and market trends, the contributors to this collection demonstrate the multilayered influence of often contradictory forces. In-depth, ethnographic case studies reveal the entangled relationships between local artisans, external interventions, and consumers, while acknowledging the broader frameworks in which such relationships are situated. Together these stories offer a vivid account of the socio-economic, political, and cultural dynamics in various parts of Asia and emphasize that fashion is neither a Western prerogative nor do its roots reside solely in the West.