The sociality of decolonisation: Making fashion, heritage, and cultural sustainability in Vietnam

Rimi Khan.

In Fashion’s Transnational Inequalities: Socio-Political, Economic, and Environmental edited By Anna-Mari Almila, Serkan Delice, pp.65-82.

2023

Routledge

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003219675-4

This chapter analyses how questions of diversity, decolonisation, and critiques of fashion's transnational inequalities relate to discourses of (cultural) sustainability. Through an analysis of the Vietnamese brand Kilomet109, and, in particular, the processes of embodied, intercultural knowledge sharing that are central to its work, it is argued that such practical, relational work constitutes the sociality of decolonisation. The brand's collaborations with indigenous artisans require negotiations between disparate worldviews and divergent understandings of cultural and economic value, creativity, and labour. Attention to this living sociality of indigenous heritage and its circulation via fashion markets grounds debates about cultural appropriation and sustainability in ways that are attentive to indigenous participation and autonomy. Moving away from definitions of cultural sustainability as cultural preservation to an understanding of culture as dynamic and adaptive helps to identify the opportunities for indigenous participation in contemporary fashion-making, while also allowing for conversations about the risks posed by this participation.

Funded by RMIT University Vietnam Internal Research Grant 2020