What (Not) to Wear: Refashioning Civilization in Print Media in Turn-of-the-Century Korea

On the eve of colonization in 1910, Korea was engulfed by a power struggle between China and Japan that led to the demise of the traditional East Asian world order while simultaneously confronting Western and Asian imperialisms. This moment entailed a civilization shift that consequently forced Korea to contend with a sartorial conundrum: the question of what (not) to wear. As Korea dealt with a globalizing interstate system of empires and nations and the consequent specter of modernity, sartorial norms served to create new identities being shaped within this multilayered geopolitical context of the turn of the century. This period of contesting civilizations transformed not only Korea's sense of the world, particularly as it pertained to East Asia, but also its understanding of "civilization." Sartorial debates over "new clothing" were symptomatic of new conceptions of civilization and modernity. Although the issue initially arose from changing rules in diplomatic protocol following increased dealings with foreign powers, it soon gained momentum as proponents of the kaehwa (enlightened civilization) movement appropriated a new vestimentary language to promote their social reforms.¹

This essay considers how the issue of clothing unwittingly came to occupy the foreground of a shifting discourse of civilization in turn-of-the-century Korea. Long before those fashionistas with the "modŏn" moniker came onto the scene in the 1920s, the Kabo Reforms of 1894 prompted vociferous debates over matters of dress and appearance. These reforms promoted the adoption of more simplified clothing and relaxed the sumptuary code that traditionally differentiated yangban (landed gentry scholar officials) and commoners.² For kaehwa leaders supporting such sartorial changes, appearance possessed emphatic meaning. Initially, they assumed an inherent fixity in "Koreanness," even as China's apparent stagnation and Japan's appropriation of Western models suggested change and fluidity. Kaehwa thinkers to a certain degree seemed to view sartorial matters as a type of wardrobe engineering in which one's mode of dress possessed sociopolitical application.³ They were promoting a type of uniform to represent the kaehwa movement as well as simultaneously perform Korea's "new civilization" in a global context. Yet they did not anticipate the ambivalence and conflict latent in clothing, which, while appearing to function in a straightforward manner, can in fact be wrought with seismic ambiguities.

I approach sartorial ambiguities produced in turn-of-the-century Korea as instances of "translated modernity," a term Lydia Liu uses to designate those ambiguous moments of contact between China and Western culture.⁴ However, kaehwa thinkers' interest in the West in the frenzied final hour preceding colonization should not be misread simply as a desire to emulate the West, but rather as a tool to reconfigure Korea as a sovereign nation-state with equivalent status in the global community—a reading not dissimilar to Stefan Tanaka's analysis of early Meiji intellectual thought in Japan.⁵ New sartorial terms were engendering shifting nuances being calibrated in this complex moment in Korean history, when kaehwa proponents were generating the contours of "new thinking" to mobilize popular political participation, stave off foreign domination, and safeguard Korea's independence. In order not to be civilizationally precluded, they sought to appropriate those elements of Janus-faced modernity that would advance their agenda of self-strengthening, wherever these could be found.

However, kaehwa leaders' nationalist endeavors were at times met with unforeseen and unauthorized translations that eluded their desire for control over the construction of a new Korean body politic. The process of appropriation involved desultory editing, inadvertent and otherwise. In this essay, I examine how clothing was articulated in print media, particularly in newspapers that disseminated the kaehwa movement's ideological platforms and in literary texts known as sinsosŏl (New Fiction).⁶ In my consideration of print media's preoccupation with refashioning identity, I delineate the ambivalent registers through which this was teased out and underscore the ways in which dress, sexed and gendered bodies, and politics exceeded and confounded the kaehwa project.

Dressing Up Kaehwa

While most studies of fashion, whether "high" or popular, attend to its...