Fashion Show of Traditional Attire: Reinterpret Fashion, Tradition, and Cultural Heritage through Contemporary Indonesian Traditional Attires

This project begins with the phenomenon of fashion shows featuring traditional attire, probing why traditional attires, taking kebaya as the primary example, are still worn by Indonesians nowadays and how they are integrated into the modern fashion industry. Fashion was once thought to be a uniquely Western phenomenon, but the case of Indonesian traditional attires demonstrates that Indonesia has its own aesthetic context that cannot be reduced to either a mimicry of the Western fashion industry or Islamic fashion in terms of religion and consumption.

Fashion is seen as innovative and futuristic, the polar opposite of Indonesian traditional culture. On the one hand, Indonesians have made kebaya the main character of fashion shows, which places the traditional attire among an industry known for its precedence, reversing the assumption of time. On the other hand, they have reduced the luxurious aspect of fashion shows, making them more accessible to the general public. Kebaya has thus evolved into a hybrid of national, traditional, and aesthetic elements, being both a biographical object and a commodity at the same time.

Besides the aforementioned issues of nationalism, tradition, and aesthetics, kebaya further entangles with the current heritage regime through being nominated onto the UNESCO representative list of intangible cultural heritage by five countries jointly.

Through case studies conducted in Taiwan and East Java, this project, adopting the concept of “aesthetics of knowledge” (Leach 2023), aims at revising contemporary dominant fashion and heritage discourse.