“These three avant-garde designers have become an international ...

dress. They begin by describing the major confrontation that took place in the 1990s: on
one side, what they term “Asian chic” (including yoga, acupuncture, organic vegetables,
sarong skirts, and kimono jackets) becomes part of the Western fashion vocabulary, while
retaining exotic flair. On the other side, “Asian men and women confronted the mundane,
but increasingly complicated, dilemma of what clothes to make, sell, buy, and wear.” 32
Historians Richard Martin and Harold Koda similarly describe Orientalism as a
fabrication of the West with no true source where “ethnicity is also suppressed in the
amalgams of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and Southeast Asian dress that come to the
Western imagination. Unable to see specific ethnic origins, the West permits the aura and
does not require a specific anthropological place.” 33
Japonism is an established—and long challenged—construction in the Western
tradition. At the end of Japan’s isolation period in the 1860s, artists like Pierre Bonnard
and James McNeill Whistler used Japanese imagery, as seen from newly discovered
ukiyo-e prints, as signifiers of the erotic, natural, and primitive in their paintings. In their
parallel design reform cause, Owen Jones and Christopher Dresser looked to Japanese
ceramics and other objects to create new forms. Jun I. Kunai contends that japonism in
fashion, as in these other mediums, evolved from “the imitation of individual motifs to
stylistic assimilation, and from there to creative transformations.” 34 Most narratives of
Japonism in Western dress begin in the late nineteenth century evidenced by the
application of new motifs to garments and the emergence of the tea gown, which
resembled the aesthetics of Japanese robes. Some note the similarities between Japanese
and modern art, which lent themselves to fashions of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the
borrowing of minimal forms into the 1940s and 1950s. 35 These mid-century
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