Abstract
Since 2000, based on the accelerated cultural globalization, a new TV production genre –trendy drama– have been massively created by the East Asian TV industries to signify Asian modernity. This has therefore developed a specific popular culture phenomenon circulated within Asia and brought forth a sense of fashion, that exclusively belongs to the contemporary Asian aesthetic perspective. The aim of this article is to explore how the Taiwanese TV industry has adapted this drama genre to represent a range of women’s fashion, through which the modern Taiwanese women’s attitudes are able to exhibit. It is argued that the East Asian TV industry has symbolic power to create trendy drama, the new genre in Asia, conveying zeitgeist for Asian audiences to recognize. The drama performs as a specific symbolic form, enabling the Asian TV industries, such as the Taiwanese, to employ its encoding strategies in costume. Roland Barthes’s semiotics in fashion is drawn for this paper to analyze both levels of signification of costuming in My Queen, a Taiwanese women-led trendy drama. By displaying the heroine’s fashion, this paper also looks into deep culture signified in this drama. The drama represents a modern society, where women are not limited in what they can wear or do. In the wake of registering specific new values, women’s dressing in trendy drama gives rise to an imagined fashion community for East Asian audiences. East Asian people then relook at themselves and start to identify their Asian-owned fashion, no longer in the pursuit of Western popular aesthetics.
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Peng, HP. (2019). ‘Another Genre’ of Media in Fashion: The East Asian TV Industry Mediates Youth’s Popular Aesthetics. In: Kalbaska, N., Sádaba, T., Cominelli, F., Cantoni, L. (eds) Fashion Communication in the Digital Age. FACTUM 2019. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15436-3_9
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