Nadya Wang Sin Yee (PhD, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London)
Fashion
My research considers how Her World magazine, as part of wider visual and design culture, used dress and fashion to construct templates of ideal Singaporean femininity in the 1970s and 1980s. Through an analysis of selected images using postmodern and postcolonial theories, I seek a better understanding of the ways Singaporean women saw themselves and the complex process of constructing their identities at a time when global expectations of women’s roles at home and at work were debated. The thesis also situates Singapore’s nascent fashion industry in the country’s ambitious project of modernisation and economic progress. Thus, it not only considers visual and discursive representations, but also locates meanings in reality.