英文摘要 |
The fold has become one of the key concepts in theorizing the mutability and contingency of history as marvelously demonstrated in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project and Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold. This paper attempts to connect the fold (or pleats) in clothing with the fold in philosophy to map out a creative assemblage that helps to shed new light on both contemporary critical theory and fashion studies. It takes the historical case of dress reform in colonial Taiwan in which the modern Chinese-style cheongsam (qipao) was demanded by the colonial authority to be “folded” into a Western-style dress as a point of departure to theorize history itself as a folding process. The paper is divided into three major parts. Part I tries to negotiate a conceptual connectivity of the fold between Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze to foreground how the “folding forces” of differentiation traverse the “unfolded forms” of differenciation and also how history itself is disclosed as an incessant process of “folding, unfolding, refolding.” Part II argues that the “cheongsamdress (Western one-piece)” in the 1920s was linked topologically as having always already been folded and unfolded in history by the force of modernity as maximizing the moving speed and minimizing the gender difference. Part III attempts to displace the “integration of the Chinese and the Western” model long promulgated in the (post)colonial sartorial analysis with a different conceptualization of the “folding of the Chinese and the Western” in which a topological thinking of fashion can substitute successfully for the typological thinking of the historical costume studies. |