Fashioning Futures, Designing Dreams: Gender, Class and Dress in Kathmandu

Are fashionable dressing practices reflective of class belonging, or can they be cleverly leveraged to create lasting class mobility for individuals with the knowledge and ability to know how to properly deploy them? This dissertation attempts to answer this question by examining the role of modern material culture in the lives of lower-middle-class women who have chosen to study fashion design at one of the most affordable of Kathmandu’s now numerous “fashion institutes.” My focus is on how these unmarried women (in their late teens to early twenties) use dress—as object and symbol—to mediate and contest the pressures they experience between expectations to be traditional (and marriageable within their class and caste communities) and modern, between the necessity to be frugal and the desire to claim a place in the city’s fashioned and fashionable middle-class public sphere. The project’s epicenter is the Namuna College of Fashion Technology in a middle-class Kathmandu suburb, where I conducted nine months of extensive autoethnographic research alongside women enrolled in Namuna’s fashion degree course. The research consisted of participant observation while students completed their coursework, extended to many aspects of informants' lives, and incorporated formal interviews and media analysis. The dissertation chapters detail the modern-day dressing practices of women in Kathmandu, examining how the supply and distribution of clothing in the city affects young women's choices about what to wear. The chapters also consider the way that kinship, gendered moral expectations, and social surveillance inform the way that young women present themselves and the way they agentively use this self-presentation to meet their own future goals. Most importantly, the dissertation highlights the way that young women use fashion as a practice and fashion education as a form of cultural capital to make claims about what—and ultimately, who—is fashionable in the city to influence the dressing practices of others. Simultaneously, they are also attempting to create a space for themselves in higher class households where their special talents for self-presentation and fashion consumption can become evidence of their family’s material success and global modernity.

Author dc:creator

• Sarah Shepherd Manandhar (23291305)

• Anthropology
• Cultural

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.25417/uic.31451044.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/31451044