This article was initially published on the Chicago Japanese American Historical Society's website: www.cjahs.org.
Why do we live in Chicago? It is not for the weather, traffic is not a big selling point and as far as the government, well I think enough said. We live here because of a word that I fear is quickly becoming a cliché, diversity. Living in small cities while working my way through school, I quickly became bored with the lack of diversity in those towns and grew to love Chicago’s people and food, music and architecture, art and though I am not a devoted fan, sport. The constant variation keeps my mind (and stomach) stimulated and entertained.
So to this end, on a February morning when a faint hint of spring was in the air, a diverse group of Chicagoans gathered at the Indo-American Center on North California Avenue to discuss how attire and appearance impact the Japanese American and Asian Indian American communities. Present were representatives from the Field Museum, Indo-American Center, Japanese-American Cultural Association and the Urasenke Chicago Association, a group of Japanese and American tea enthusiasts; the group that I am affiliated with and the reason I had been asked to participate.
This was the first planning session for Cultural Connections, an event sponsored by The Field Museum’s Center for Cultural Understanding and Change. The center brings the museums anthropological mission into the neighborhoods of Chicago by partnering more than twenty ethic museums and cultural centers. The theme for this year’s programs -- The Language of Looks.
Though we are here to organize the event, I find myself in the midst of one of the best history classes I have ever attended. My fellow attendees comment not only on history, but demographics, anthropology, theology, philosophy and no less important, fashion design.
I learn that Japanese history in the United States begins with the Meiji period, some 150 years ago when Commodore Perry's Black ships forced Japan to open its doors to the West. These first immigrants to America were farmers and agricultural workers. Their history in America is complicated by import quotas, exclusion laws, picture-brides and darkest of all, forced internment and resettlement.
This contrasts with the more recent history of an urban Asian Indian culture that migrated to America in the 1960's during the Cold War in response to a need for professionals, mainly scientist, engineers and doctors. They had the advantage of speaking English and being able to settle wherever the jobs took them. There was no need for them to be segregated into towns as the Japanese were on the West coast.
Their disparate backgrounds have seen the Japanese strive for inclusion while the Asian Indian's inclination has been to blend and reshape American culture. To think of this in real-time, count how many women you have seen in sari versus kimono, it will be thousands to one.
The title of the program is “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall…How Am I Perceived By All?” As the afternoon proceeds various presenters discuss how history, politics, economics and culture all play a role in dress, as does social status, gender, group affiliation, profession, values and taste. How the resources available to us, our communities accumulated knowledge and creativity, combine to affect how we perceive ourselves and how we are perceived by the culture at large. And you thought dressing for work in the morning was simple.
What is dress after all but cloth? It is just there, unless drawn attention to as in couture. It is what grandma and grandpa wear, and what culturally aware youth use to play off of: sari with jeans and high heels, coats and accessories made out of antique kimono fabric. For most, ethnic dress is only brought out of the closet for important milestones: birth, coming of age, marriage and death. It is not a comfortable part of life.
We think of ourselves as sophisticated and some how distanced from the natural world, but as Darwin's finches have evolved their coat of feathers in response to natural selection and isolation, so has our dress. Many years ago I spent three months on a small farm in the town of Ulvik, Norway. During the summer, at festivals and weddings, the locals came dressed in traditional garb and depending on where the revelers hailed from their dress differed slightly. It was very regionally specific to a trained eye. Trying to figure which towns were represented at these events was a bit like bird watching.
Another aspect of dress not often considered is technique. You do not just throw kimono or sari on−you dress. There are multiple layers and acres of cloth to wrap yourself in. There is extravagant jewelry and demur sashes to be adorned with and then there are the knots.
I have become intimately aware of this since acquiring my first kimono in the 1980’s. In Western clothes knots are not much of a consideration. Most men learn to tie their shoes and neck ties early in life, usually instructed by a patient grand parent. Women have scarves to master, but these pale to the knots involved with wearing kimono.
Having sailed on Lake Michigan for forty years and practicing marlinspike seamanship for much of that time, I still find securing my kimono a daunting task. Most knot tying is done in front of you with the proper orientation, but when dressing you are at a disadvantage. If you are lucky enough to have a mirror then what you see is backwards and if not, well it is like tying your shoe laces with your foot tied back behind you.
But what does this have to do with ethnic dress, simply it was all designed before that little machine we seldom think of, the zipper. I am not sure when the zipper was first developed, but I know a lot has changed in the world since then and our specific cultures have had to adapt to the changes.
A perfect example of this was the story told by a young college-aged Asian Indian women concerning nose piercing. Her mother was shocked to find out she had gotten her nose pierced while away at college, but her grandmother was so happy that she bought her multiple nose rings. It was as if her ethnicity skipped a generation before reasserting itself. Her mother had done what she could to fit in and her daughter had found a way to blend tradition with the fashion of the day to make a strong personal statement.
So in the end what are we left with? Some one at the end of the program commented that the topic should not have been the Language of Looks but the Calculus of Looks because dress is the outcome of multiple variables. It is an adaptation, over hundreds of years by millions of people, in response to the world they find themselves in. Sometimes in favorable circumstances and sometimes in dire ones, but always looking to the future and to what will be the best for them and more importantly for their children, though they seldom realize this until they themselves are parents and grand parents.
