■ Source: Lynn, Hyung-Gu, ‘Fashioning Modernity: Changing Meanings of Clothing in Colonial Korea’, Journal of International and Area Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3 (2004), pp. 75–93. FASHIONING MODERNITY: CHANGING MEANINGS OF CLOTHING IN COLONIAL KOREA Hyung-Gu Lynn ‘Modernity’ encompasses a multitude of concepts and definitions. This article take a material marker of modernity—clothing—and uses it as an analytic prism to exam- ine the changes in social, economic, and political arenas and discourses of Korea’s colonial period (1910–1945). I analyze the meanings of clothing in specific contexts such as: the contemporary re-association of Korean ethnic identity with traditional clothes; the beginnings of change in the language of clothes; the utility and limits of the standard colonial oppression-resistance binary; transformations in socio- economic structure; and the diffusion of visual technology and constructions of gen- der in multiplying sartorial selection and meaning. 1. Introduction It seems to have been part of the academic parlance forever: “modernity.” Always “new” yet “always-ever-the-same” (Benjamin 1938–9: 42–3), it is a term that for some requires no explanation and for others demands fur- ther exploration. Assumptions and definitions abound, but it would be safe to say that modernity’s reach encompasses both the material and the conceptual. From tangible tokens of technological progress (e.g. skyscrap- ers, air conditioners, automobiles, micro fibers, etc.) to a cluttered con- stellation of concepts (e.g. literacy, visuality, mass communications and mass production, scientific rationalism, individualism, increased speed, secularization, bureaucratization, and industrialization, among others), its multiplicity and indeterminacy have allowed modernity to be “a para- doxical unity, a unity of disunity,” generating “a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish” (Berman 1982: 15). There are no shortages of abstract treatises portraying modernity as the ineluctable progress of forces of science and capitalism unbound, leaving the pitted remains of vanquished myths, superstitions, status, and reli- gions in its wake. Rather than reproduce such efforts, I take as my ana- lytic focus an everyday material object that straddles the intersections of 559-584_CRITICAL READING (LYNN) Vol. 2_F11.indd 559 11/7/2012 12:40:26 PM