Contemporary Indonesian Fashion

Through the Looking Glass

Alessandra Lopez y Royo

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350061323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

Indonesian fashion has undergone a period of rapid growth over the last three decades. This book explores how through years of social, political, and cultural upheaval, the country's fashion has moved away from "colonial fashion" and "national dress" to claim its own distinct identity as contemporary fashion in a global world. With specific reference to women's wear, Contemporary Indonesian Fashion explores the diversity and complexity of the country's sartorial offerings, which weave together local textile traditions like batik and ikat -making with contemporary narratives. The book questions concepts of "tradition" and "modernity" in the developing world, taking stock of the elite consumption of luxury brands and the large-scale manufacturing of fast fashion, and introduces us to the rise of new trends such as busana muslim (or "modest wear"), creating a portrait of a vibrant and growing national and, increasingly, international, industry. Exploring clothing in shopping malls, on the catwalk, in magazines, and online, the book examines how Indonesian fashion is made, presented, and consumed, combining research in Indonesia with analysis and personal reflection. Contemporary Indonesian Fashion ultimately questions the deeply entrenched eurocentrism of "global fashion", simultaneously interrogating current homogenizing beauty and body image discourses posited as universal, by pointing to absences, silences, and erasures as reflected by contemporary Indonesian fashion- hence the "looking glass" of the title. Aptly illustrated, the book offers a new perspective on a rapidly developing new fashion capital, Jakarta.

PART ONE

INDONESIAN
CHIC PAST AND
PRESENT

1

A BRIEF HISTORY OF FASHION IN INDONESIA

Indonesian dress through time: Pre-colonial and colonial period

I begin my discussion of contemporary Indonesian fashion trying to make sense of its past. Thus, in this chapter I look at Indonesia as a fashion locus, through a historical lens, and attempt to sketch out its trajectory and transitions, briefly examining its incarnations as pre-colonial, colonial, and post-independence dress, and as national dress under the New Order. It feels like a tour de force to compress so many centuries, aware that for each period a different fashion system is in place that should be separately studied; but through this effort I intend to provide a context and a background for the story I am weaving. It is important to be aware of what has preceded and shaped the fashion explosion of post-reformasi Indonesia, which is what I regard as contemporary Indonesian fashion, in order to understand better its position as the new kid on the block in a fast-paced and highly competitive global fashion scene.

Heidi Boehlke notes, in her nuanced account, that fashion in post-independence and New Order Indonesia grew as an articulation of national culture and was consolidated by the government support it received as a means to forge a national identity. She names it “ethnafashion,” an acronym for ethnic, national, and fashion.¹ This nationalist legacy underpins contemporary developments. In the course of this chapter I shall unveil the dynamics at work in this construct as also the forces engaged in dismantling it and transforming it, in the light of newer socio-cultural and political configurations, such as the rise of an Islamic “anti-fashion” discourse² that is globally articulated.

Reprising my earlier comments on the polarized dichotomy that has been created in many fashion studies scholarship between dress and fashion, with dress, unlike fashion, firmly established as an object of “serious” anthropological investigation, I shall use here “dress” to refer to the clothing and fashion of pre-modern and pre-colonial Indonesia only interchangeably with “fashion.” “Dress”, in my view, is not in opposition to “fashion” nor do I use the term solely with reference to “traditional” dress.

I also readily acknowledge the existence of multiple fashion systems, as yet not widely studied, in Indonesian history, starting with pre-colonial Indonesia.³ As for the colonial period, over the past decade or so there have been exemplary in-depth studies of sartorial history in the Netherlands Indies, which have further illuminated the powerful role of dress and fashion as socio-cultural markers in a series of far-reaching social and political transformations.⁴

My first encounter with the dress of pre-colonial Indonesia was through the narrative reliefs of the Central Javanese temples of Borobudur and Prambanan (circa 700 to 900 CE) and the imagery from the East Javanese temples, both the free-standing Singosari sculptures, such as Mahisasuramardini Durga, and the stylized narrative panels of candi Jago and candi Panataran (eleventh to fourteenth century CE) and many more such temples. There have been several studies of the iconography of these monuments, including my own research on the dance reliefs of Prambanan, in which I briefly touched on the dancing figures’ attire, and there have also been notable attempts at relating the patterns of the sculpted walls of Javanese temples to existing textile motifs from the area.⁵

But the clothing of the figures has never been described as more than a generic “cloth” or “garment,” or maybe a kain, focusing instead in much greater detail on the elaborate headdresses and jewelry—I readily admit that I have myself been guilty of such superficiality in my past study. It is most arduous to find terms of reference for such ancient attires in the clothing worn by people in real life today because of the significant time gap. Moreover, one should steer clear of giving in to the temptation of projecting present-day practices onto the past, with imagined and tenuous continuities affecting the reconstruction, to avoid becoming entangled in a process of reinvention of tradition, with all its consequences.⁶ The garments seen in these sculptures often seem to be see-through, although that may be simply an iconographic device to emphasize their lightness. Nor can we be sure about fabrics. Is it silk or is it cotton? We are not able to do more than conjecture.

Kieven describes the aristocratic women of Majapahit temples as “adorned with more jewellery … and their breasts are covered by a kenben. Royal females as well as their maid servants often wear a second cloth beneath the outer one.” In other words, the higher the class, the more clothed the individual.⁷ Kenben (or kemben) is a key word here, as it shows that what today is an item of Javanese traditional court dress worn, for example, by brides and by Serimpi and Bedhaya dancers,⁸ was perhaps similarly used back in those days, though it could have been just a cloth wrapped tightly around the breasts to cover them and support their weight, an ancient brassière of sort.

Covering the breasts would have been unusual for lower-class women. Balinese village women going about their daily chores bare-breasted up to the days of colonial rule in Bali, which came under direct Dutch administration in the nineteenth century, later than other parts of Indonesia, have been well documented. There is indeed a whole literature devoted to an examination of the male gaze and Balinese female breasts, as part of the widely touted construct of Bali as a tourist paradise.⁹

The Singosari Mahisasuramardini currently housed at the Museum Voor Volkenkunde, Leiden, is a stunning piece of sculpture, 5 feet 9 inches (175 cm) in height, representing the goddess Durga in the act of slaying the demon Mahisa. We can clearly see that the goddess wears a layered cloth round the hips, perhaps a double-folded one, decorated with geometric motifs and tied in such a way as to fall into pleats at the front. It is comfortable enough as to allow for her wide, powerful warrior stance. An ornamented belt holds the lower cloth tight round her hips. She also wears what appears to be an embroidered light bodice, a kemben, held close to the body with a folded cloth (or is it a wide border?) just above the waist, her multiple arms bare. Her waist, navel, and the area immediately above the hips are fully exposed. Necklaces, bracelets, and a tall, richly decorated headdress complete her attire. It is not possible to identify what precious stones and metals were used in the abundant jewelry she wears, but from the existence of refined jewelry in the gold hoards discovered in Java, dating back to the eighth and ninth centuries, we can assume she wore gold, as that precious metal was known and used in ancient Java.¹⁰

Much of the clothing we see in sculptures from this and later times, or in the illustrated ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Praise
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on spelling
• About the author
• Prologue
• Part One Indonesian chic Past and Present
• 1 A brief history of fashion in Indonesia
• Part Two Presenting Fashion
• 2 Performing fashion: Fashion weeks, fashion events, fashion-as-art
• 3 “Made in Indonesia” for the global stage
• Part Three Mediating Fashion
• 4 Fashion in print and online: Digitalizing beauty and style
• Part Four Consuming Fashion
• 5 Visiting malls and buying online: Shopping for style
• 6 Wearing clothes, styling the self: Indonesian women and fashion
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright