Social Empathy and National Dress
Grace Petersen
In our class at UC Davis, we have only just started week two, but we are already learning a lot about the national dress of different asian cultures. For week two, we go in depth about both the Vietnamese Ao Dai and the Korean Hanbok, and learn as well about the cultural exchange between the two nations with a particular focus on fashion. Professor Valverde and her associate Michael Hurt provide us some of the readings for this week, as we learn about their collaborative work in Saigon and Seoul.
Vietnam is a popular location for Koreans to visit and live, and vice versa. In class we watched a short clip about South Korea's Hanbok revival which has led to a boom in tourists renting and wearing Hanbok, and this relationship is actually quite reciprocal with many Koreans wearing Ao Dai when visiting Vietnam. Michael Hurt describes this relationship as one of social empathy, or more plainly walking in another's shoes.
A group of South Korean Tourists exploring Saigon in Ao Dai. (Photo Credit: Saigon Times)
Hurt and Valverde's collaborative project centers on the culture interchange between fashionistas and social media influencers between the two countries and documenting this through fashion photography. This is a self-styled Sartiorial-semiotic project, or "trying to connect people (who want to be connected) across borders through art." (Hurt, via Korean Times). So what does social empathy mean exactly, and how does it relate to fashion? After this week I mulled over the concept, especially in relation to two countries that have been under colonist occupation, and found that it is incredibly important in the global scale: it's about being able to see yourself in someone else, regardless the outfit or the face wearing it.
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