Threads of Identity
Twine Game
Follow our main character, Linh, as she stumbles upon a traditional áo dài in her attic and is transported back to 1930s Vietnam. There, she witnesses firsthand the changes brought about by French colonial influence on Vietnamese traditional áo dài, fashion, and modernity.
Narrative Statement
Contributors
Our project “Threads of Identity” will focus on Vietnamese fashion to demonstrate the modernization, evolution, and influences colonization has had on clothing. We hope to accomplish this project by creating an interactive game to highlight the changes in Vietnamese fashion. Initially, all group members will work together on collecting the data and creating a rough narrative. We have utilized Google Spreadsheets to collect different fashion visualizations and illustrations from the Technique de Peuple by Henri Oger and Phong Hoa articles. Jenny, Misaki, Celestia, and Miranda were responsible for viewing approximately 175 images and categorizing images based on fashion items. Caroline reviewed the Phong Hoa magazines for textual and visual analysis. In addition to the data collection spreadsheet, we utilized Google Docs to collaboratively create a narrative story for the game we are building. Our group has read sections of “Wearing Modernity: Lemur Nguyễn Cát Tường, Fashion, and the “Origins” of the Vietnamese National Costume” by Martina Thucnhi Nguyen to aid in our narrative forming.
For efficiency, each group member will review and collaborate on shared elements of the project. Additionally, to streamline the work process, we will have members primarily focus on either: narrative writing or game building. Each small group will consist of two to three members; however, all members will reconvene to participate in all elements of the project. Caroline, Celestia, and Miranda will be working on the narrative writing and Jenny and Misaki will be working on the game building. Our project format includes an interactive online game where the player can go through different scenes to explore the various changes in fashion during the pre-French colonial period and post-French colonization.
Project Question
The question we are trying to answer throughout the game is “How did French colonization and Western influences shape the development of fashion in Vietnam in 1930s?”
Wearing Modernity: Lemur Nguyễn Cát Tường, Fashion, and the ‘Origins’
Vietnamese fashion has changed significantly over time due to various Western influences and historical contexts. Below is the evolution of fashion listed in chronological order. We will use this factual background information to craft a narrative in our game. The narrative will lead the main character to experience a series of events and provide educational information on history.
Early 19th Century: Nguyen Dynasty Reforms
In 1828, long skirts and certain types of hats and hairstyles were banned by Emperor Minh Mang. In Rural women, the predominant fashion is the four-panel tunic worn with a skirt. Among urban women, they preferred the five-panel tunic and wore it with trousers.
Early 20th Century: Initial Changes and French Influence
In the 1920s, women began to adopt vibrant colors and imported fabrics instead of the traditional dull earth tones. They replaced black trousers with white ones and like to part their hair on the side. Wearing high-heeled shoes also gained popularity. Men, on the other hand, were significantly more influenced by Western culture. Men started cutting their topknots and cut their hair short to fit with the Western style. Among urban bourgeois men and youth, three-piece suits and ties become more common.
1930s: Lemur Nguyen Cat Tuong and Modern Fashion
In 1934, Lemur Cat Tuong brought significant reform in women’s clothing and pushed Vietnamese fashion to modernity. He designed the Lemur tunic, which eliminate the fifth panel, lengthened panels for a more graceful silhouette, and a more formfitting bodice to highlight the chest and waistline. These changes are also correlated with Europeanized social standards.
Late 20th Century: Áo dài and Globalization
In the mid to late 1990s, Vietnamese traditional áo dài was greatly influenced by globalization. The design of áo dài remains the form-fitting bodice and long flowing panels introduced by Lemur. But the traditional mandarin collar and tight sleeves are back during this period. Contemporary áo dài are made from silk and synthetic materials. The colors and patterns are also more diverse and reflect international fashion elements.
A documented encyclopedia that compiles graphic illustrations and narratives of Vietnamese people. We used this source to focus on how French colonization influenced the elements and style of Vietnamese fashion.
Pre-Colonial Era (Before 19th Century)
Áo dài, Ao Tu Than, and Yem are the three traditional Vietnamese clothing styles before Western influence. Áo dài for women and Ao The for men are usually handmade from local stores and materials, such as silk or cotton. These clothes are long, flowing, and modest. The colors are vibrant, and the patterns on the clothing symbolize social status.
French Colonization (Mid-19th Century to 1945)
Western fabric and clothing style brought significant changes in Vietnamese clothing during the French colonial period. For example, the áo dài was changed to a tighter fit, higher collars, and Western-style buttons and fastening. Lace and wool were also introduced.
Nguyen Tuong Tam, a recent graduate from Paris, acquired the newspaper after 13 issues with few readers. This marked a new chapter for the newspaper as the mission to criticize the backwardness of the An Nam people compared to the modern civilization of the French, and advocate for a new bourgeois lifestyle that propels the An Nam people forward and for the better.” This suggests that Phong Hoa is exactly the material our project needs as it focuses on Vietnamese fashion and demonstrates modernization, evolution, and the influence colonization has had on clothing. With that being said, we will only examine and work with Phong Hoa newspaper prints from the 14th publication onward. Below is a page from Phong Hoa promoting Western clothing:
Phong Hoa dedicated a section on the 4rd page of every publication to women, called “vẻ đẹp riêng tặng các bà các cô,” and LeMur Nguyen Cat Tuong is the chief editor for this section. My research found that LeMur Nguyen Cat Tuong is the father of today’s áo dài. He played a major role in modernizing and evolving the Vietnamese traditional costume. Although initially aimed only at urban women, especially fashion-conscious young women, the movement to reform women’s clothing by LeMur Nguyen Cat Tuong later became widely adopted as the new clothing standard for Vietnamese women.
Methodologies Statement
Critique
Our primary source is the Technique de Peuple by Henri Oger, which compiles graphic illustrations and narratives of Vietnamese people. Oger conducted fieldwork, documented in the encyclopedia, which offers many visual assets of Vietnamese history. However, there are significant limitations to his work. The encyclopedia comprises over 4200+ illustrations but offers a very limited amount of contextual information. Because Oger is French, his work is drawn from a French-dominated perspective which affects the accuracy of his representation of Vietnamese culture. For instance, some of his illustrations resemble caricatures and carry underlying racist undertones. As a result, his work exhibits less empathy from a colonized perspective compared to observations made by a Vietnamese person. This perspective gap may suppress and overlook marginalized stories, voices, and occupations of various Vietnamese people who are not included in this source.
Phong Hoa magazine had similar limitations as Technique de Peuple because it was written from a Western advocate and Western-centric perspective. Although Nguyen Tuong Tam, the Phong Hoa’s chief, and LeMur Nguyen Cat Tuong, chief of the women’s section, were both Vietnamese, they adopted a French lifestyle from their time studying in the West. Therefore, they created a mixed yet unique perspective on Phong Hoa, providing a comprehensive critique of Vietnamese lifestyle and attire while urging for a new lifestyle that aspired towards modern civilization. It is intriguing how openly they criticize their Vietnamese people, who constitute part of their audience. It is difficult to conclude whether the magazine convinces readers through their writing, or whether the writing itself reflects common thinking among people in Ha Noi. However, it is important to recognize that the magazine does not present a complete picture of Vietnamese society in the 1930s; as such, the content may only resonate with a specific type of audience. If there was a comparison with a publication from Saigon and other regions of Vietnam during this period, it could help us better understand the French influence on Vietnamese society at the time.
Creation
We plan on creating a Twine game which is an interactive, “choose your character” story. Twine allows users to explore pathways based on their choices. For this approach, we will be using decolonial methodologies and critical fashion studies in Vietnam to explore Vietnamese fashion history. Our narrative team used sources like On Our Strength, Chapter 3, which examines how fashion, specifically the áo dài, became a symbol of national identity and resistance during the post-colonial period, and “Wearing Modernity Lemur Nguyễn Cát Tường, Fashion, and the “Origins” of the Vietnamese National Costume” which analyzes how modern Vietnamese fashion designers reinterpret traditional garments, highlighting the significance of clothing in communicating messages.
Our visual asset collection involves using the Technique de Peuple by Henri Oger. Focusing primarily on fashion within the Technique de Peuple, our group conducted a visual analysis of the images, descriptions, and stories within Orger’s work. We used Google Sheets to review over 700 pages, noting relevant garments and actions depicted in the graphic illustrations that we can use later in the Twine game. Each page was manually examined and the images were categorized with tags such as Production, People/Interaction, Character, Clothing Item, and Location to streamline the process. We also included the Google Drive links to ensure that the game-building team could efficiently access and review the images. By drawing on the contextual and visual insights gathered from our primary source, and supplementing them with our imagination and creativity, we collaged images together to complement our narrative. This methodology allows our team to confront the limitations of Oger’s work. Oger’s work lacked textual context and contained a French colonial bias. Through the knowledge we gained from reading On Our Strength, “Wearing Modernity Lemur Nguyễn Cát Tường, Fashion, and the “Origins” of the Vietnamese National Costume,” and the Phong Hoa magazines, we were able to provide a more nuanced understanding and inclusive representation to our story. Our Twine story includes multiple pathways and settings that can be explored which helps to highlight marginalized stories that Oger’s original work may have suppressed or overlooked.
As Phong Hoa magazine involves both text analysis and visual analysis, it was challenging to find an approach that properly covered both forms of information. Therefore, we scanned all available publications to identify patterns and common themes. It is important to note that we focused on the 14th publication onward, as mentioned previously. Equipped with secondary sources on the áo dài and the magazine’s history, we gained contextual understanding while engaging with the material. We discovered that Phong Hoa magazine dedicated the 4th page of every publication to women and beauty. From there, we narrowed our scope further before carefully analyzing specific text and visuals. For example, we observed that the publication in August 1934 was themed around beaches and vacations, which was significant as it illustrates the juxtaposition of different outfits for various occasions. Given that our project includes scenes from several periods and fashion trends, we decided the publication would provide useful background for one of the scenes.
In terms of narration, our initial idea was a Twine game through which players could explore the history of Vietnamese women’s fashion in the 1930s by selecting from three options: embracing Vietnamese attire, adopting Western clothing, or rediscovering the áo dài. Struggling to come up with a coherent plot, we turned to ChatGPT for assistance, hoping to get some ideas on how to structure our story. The prompt provided to ChatGPT was to outline a story for a Twine game with the aforementioned three options. While ChatGPT did provide a basic story outline, we decided to only utilize its general direction rather than its specific plot points. By direction, we mean following the narrative structure ChatGPT outlined: starting from the introduction, progressing through the three phases, transitions, and concluding the story. The main benefit of using ChatGPT was that through its examples, we learned how to create a plot, break it down into smaller phases, and understand narrative writing style. However, the main drawback of ChatGPT was that it took extra efforts to redirect ChatGPT in generating the plot we envisioned. From the basic story outline generated by ChatGPT, we collectively elaborated the story with details, creating a complete story of Linh, a Vietnamese American woman transported back to Hanoi in 1930. Through witnessing fashion transitions through the years, Linh learns a valuable lesson about heritage and identity.
Environmental Scan
In exploring the topic of fashion it is imperative to explore greater themes being presented within the transition of fashion during the era of French Colonialism. In exploring our central reading of Wearing Modernity: Lemur Nguyễn Cát Tường, Fashion, and the “Origins” of the Vietnamese National Costume by Martina Thucnhi Nguyen, we are already presented with a different narrative on the expansion of gender norms and the transition of tradition under French rule. In interacting with these sources and our data set we seek to build a project that imagines what the experience would be to visually see this transition occur. Pulling from Technique de Peuple and Phong Hoa we will be able to visually contrast modern fashion with traditional Vietnamese fashion. Within these comparisons, we cannot underscore the effects of fashion on the role of women, class divides, and Vietnamese tradition as a whole within a period of colonization.
Our Twine game will showcase the development of Vietnamese identity by allowing the player to experience the development of the modern áo dài through every path taken in the Twine. While exploring different scenes you will be able to see the impact of colonialism on Vietnam visually, both the acceptance and denial of Westernization. As Linh, our main character, learns more about her history when going back in time, she learns more about herself and her place in the world, combating the colonial intention of subjugating cultural histories. The movement of history through the áo dài and Linh creates an opportunity for players to engage more critically with their own experiences by placing fashion as the visual representative of Vietnamese history. Linh stands as a representation of the children of the diaspora who feel disconnected from their culture, seeking family stories and the history that was stolen from them. Her journey is an act of reclamation for all who have had their identities subjugated by years of colonialism, imperialism, and forced assimilation.
Conclusion Statement
Our project aims to encompass the changes in fashion within Vietnamese society by utilizing differences within fashion during the French colonization period. We hope this project can illuminate the impact this historical period has had on Vietnamese society and how some of these elements may continue to exist today. By exploring these various data visuals, the audience can immerse themselves in the changes in fashion throughout different scenes and interactions. Additionally, we hope this project will encourage audiences to explore why these changes in fashion may have occurred and to reflect on their connections and experiences to topics such as colonialism, nationalism, and generational change.