Findings and Achievements

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FASHIONING DIASPORA SPACE: TEXTILES, PATTERN AND CULTURAL EXCHANGE BETWEEN BRITAIN AND SOUTH ASIA 1850s-80s, 1980s-2000s
Professor Philip Crang
Co-Investigators: Professor Felix Driver, Dr Christopher Breward, Ms Rosemary Crill

FINDINGS AND ACHIEVEMENTS

  • South Asian clothing textiles have long been both apparent and appreciated within British culture. The Fashioning Diaspora Space project investigated this presence of South Asian materials in British culture in both colonial and postcolonial times, teasing out the differing forms of cultural exchange operating within and across these historical periods. It brought together an interdisciplinary team based in the university and museum sectors, and involved four interrelated strands of work. The first of these focused in particular on the collections of Indian textiles made for the South Kensington (later Victoria and Albert) Museum from the 1850s to the 1880s, drawing out their implications in British imperial cultures of design, manufacture, exhibition and consumption. The second strand of work shifted focus to contemporary British Asian diasporas, including, for example, qualitative research on British Asian women's wardrobes and dress practices. A third research strand worked across the first two, engaging contemporary British-Asian fashion practitioners and consumers with the V&A's collections. The project's fourth research strand comprised practice-led visual arts research, specifically drawing research, that explored the place of South Asian textiles in British cultures of pattern.

  • The project successfully undertook archival research within and beyond the V&A and analysed the different biographies of acquisition and circulation, and material forms, related to three parts of the V&A's collection of South Asian clothing textiles, namely: those related to Owen Jones' seminal intervention in British design culture, The Grammar of Ornament; those related to the Forbes Watson volumes of textile samples; and those related to Casper Purdon-Clarke's activities as collector for the museum and designer of imperial exhibitions.

  • Interview work was carried out with designers and retailers operating across Britain and South Asia and using South Asian materials, exploring how they differently navigate questions of material form, heritage and creativity, and the making of styles that are truly distinctive rather than merely representative of a presumed cultural difference; and extended our focus beyond British Asian 'fashion space' through in-depth qualitative research with contemporary British Asian women, discussing their dress practices and 'mapping' their wardrobes.

  • Engagements were staged with the V&A collection of South Asian textiles, via a series of public discussion events and sessions in the museum store rooms targeted at British Asian textile / fashion practitioners and consumers. The project also produced a creative exploration, through drawing research, of the implication of South Asian clothing textiles in the visual cultures of London's diasporic urban landscapes, bringing together work on the spaces of the exhibitionary complex in South Kensington with work on the retail spaces of Green Street, Newham.

  • Through its focus on clothing textiles the project has demonstrated the material constitution of diasporic culture, and suggested three distinct forms for it (Crang 2010). First, the research has shown how these textiles objectify diasporic social relations, sensibilities and identities. Second, the project has also shown how textiles themselves can be diasporic, constituting fields of cultural dispersal, exchange and invention - a traffic in culture - that is not reducible to human migration. Third, the project has also paid particular attention to the material spaces through which South Asian textiles have been presented in British culture. Diasporic things are part of diasporic landscapes and environments, as Helen Scalway's artwork explores in both the spaces of South Kensington's imperial archive and of Green St in Newham, London (Scalway 2008, 2009).

  • The research has also developed a 'more diasporic' understanding of material culture, and in particular of collection and museum history. Collecting is normally cast as a geography of concentration, of consolidating, building up and locating materials and expertise upon them. Our historical research paralleled such an approach with a distinctive account of the South Kensington Museum as 'mobile museum', produced through distinctive forms of circulation (Driver and Ashmore 2010). This conception of museums as constituted through both concentration and circulation, both material location / settlement and movement, is also one that speaks, we would argue, to contemporary museological agendas of access and engagement. The research has extended previous accounts of British Asian fashion, in two main ways. First, it has taken them more directly into questions of material cultures of dress (Derrington 2010; Crang and Derrington, in preparation), paralleling wider developments in fashion studies towards ethnographic engagements with clothing practices. Second, the research has deepened the historicising of contemporary fashions for South Asian 'stuff'. Previously, the debate was set up as between those who focused on the present (and celebrated a novel popularity for South Asian culture in Britain) and those who took a longer and more sceptical view by identifying many centuries of tastes for the exotic in British culture. Our research takes the long view, but by elucidating varied 'circulatory regimes', creative practices and affective forms, both past and present, moves beyond a singular casting as exotica.

  • The research has sought to invigorate practice-led research in the area of Cultural Geography, by connecting together recent developments in 'drawing research' with long-standing geographical traditions of cartography and topography (Crang under review; Crang and Scalway in preparation). This develops wider disciplinary interests in counter-cartographies and in the arts of geography.

  • The project has sought to develop the V&A's engagement with its South Asian clothing textile collections. It has delivered significant web content for the V&A Online representation of its collections. The section on 'Indian Textiles and Empire' provides accessible scholarship on the history of the V&A collections and their implication in British imperial history. The section on 'Moving Patterns' presents artwork from the project, engaging the V&A's South Asian clothing collections with interests in drawing and arts practice both within and beyond the V&A. The section on 'British Asian Style' provides the first coverage in the V&A fashion site of British Asian perspectives and practices, links more historical interests in textiles into these contemporary concerns, showcases contemporary designers and will facilitate the uploading of user generated content on their fashion and dress practices, so that users can themselves shape what is presented in the V&A on-line collections. The project involved a number of public events at the V&A that highlighted project themes. The project has also delivered intellectual and physical resources for on-going work being undertaken by the V&A. This work ranges from the curatorial to plans for gallery development - where the project is informing the plans (subject to funding) for a refurbishment and re-installation of Gallery 40 (Fashion), with respect to both content and future display programming.

  • The project findings were disseminated and engaged wider audiences through: (on-going) academic publication; publications directed at non-academic audiences addressing British Asian Style and Indian Pattern; the production of V&A Online web content addressing 'Indian Textiles and Empire', the 'Moving Patterns' artwork, and 'British Asian Style'; a major international conference on 'Fashioning Diasporas' held at the V&A's Sackler Centre in May 2009, attended by 120 delegates; on-going exhibitions of project artwork including the 'Moving Patterns' exhibition held in the Pavilion Exhibition space of the Royal Geographical Society in May 2009 (visited by approximately 700 visitors); a series of public discussion events, ranging from a V&A 'Friday Late' event focused on 'India Now' (2007; total attendance assessed as approximately 750), to a symposium on Desi Fashion (2009) attended by 100 'non-academic' participants, to working discussion sessions including engagements with the V&A South Asian textile collection (initial event in 2008, 50 participants; further sessions with 50 more).

  • The project also organised the 'Moving Patterns' exhibition held in the Pavilion Exhibition space of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), Exhibition Road, South Kensington in May 2009. This was the first time the RGS had used its Pavilion Exhibition space for an arts exhibition, a practice that it has now developed into a rolling programme of events The 'Moving Patterns' exhibition was visited by approximately 700 visitors, the large majority non-academics. Thus, the project has impacted upon the RGS's public presentation of geographical knowledge. The project has led to outputs addressed to non-academic audiences. Besides the web materials and exhibitions, these include books from V&A Publishing on British Asian Style and Indian Pattern.

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