East Asia Global Connections and Fashion Histories

This chapter explores Asian/American/European fashion interactions across the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. It seeks to avoid a simplistic narrative of ‘exotic’ components in European fashion, or interpreting fashion globalization in broad strokes as the adoption of European dress styles by non-European societies in cultural flows from ‘the West’ to ‘the Rest’. Instead, it focuses on the complex fluidity of two particular garment types within global movements of fashion that have created multi-centred and multi-directional stories: the sukajan, also known as the souvenir or tour jacket, and the embroidered shawl (Figures 3. 1 and 3. 2) . Sukajan were originally created by the Japanese as souvenirs for American troops serving in Occupied Japan (1945–52) . As their popularity grew, sukajan became available at military bases around the world to commemorate further tours of duty in both peace and wartime. From the 1960s onward, its use in...