• 복식
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• 제50권2호
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• pp.47-58
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• 2000

This paper examines how costume, as a means of communication, acts on an individual a society, and a nation by analyzing especially the costume-wearing activities of Gandhi, an Indian national leader, in the nineteenth-century India colonized by Britain. The results are as follows. 1. Change of costume in Gandhi's case corresponds with mental change. 2. Gandhi's costume-wearing activities show his social status. 3. Gandhi's costume acts as a means of communication ; it manipulates and rules social events, transforming social -political identities. Thus, costume has a close relation to man's life. And it is an important means of communication influencing man and man's environments.

• 복식문화연구
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• 제9권1호
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• pp.1-10
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• 2001

This study is to reconsider the symbolic potential of the costume by investigating the role of cloth in Indian culture, noting the fact that Indians wore hand-woven cloth and adopted a flag with the spinning wheel in the center as part of their nationalistic programs for independence. The results are as follows; The Indian cotton industry had held the fist position in the world and spinning and weaving had been an Indian national industry until the early part of the 19th century. As for the Indian cotton industry under the rule of Britain, Indian was reduced to being a colony producing raw materials and a market of cheap British finished goods, and eventually fell into anarchy with economic poverty of the general public and peasants'uprising mixed with the complaint of the intellectuals. The Indian National Movement started as a resort to escape the British rule because of continuous poverty and social exhaustion, and its pivot was Gandhi. Gandhi launched a revolutionary noncooperation movement in Indian society with diverse races, religions and castes, and developed nation-wide campaigns such as Boycott, Swadeshi, the encouragement of spinning wheels, etc. Gandhi urged that Indians' weak identity and poverty were caused by the dissolution of their native craft and that the Indians should wear Indian products for economic independence. Accordingly, leaders of Indian National Congress regarded a spinning wheel as an economic necessity and national symbol, and approved manual spinning and weaving as part of their nationalistic programs in order to drew the general public to the nationalistic movement in 1920. They also decided that all Congressmen should wear hand-woven cloth, Khadi, and adopted spinning wheels as the logo type of Indian National Congress. Khadi, Indian national cloth, was a symbol of national unification, freedom and equality, and also a means of economic self-sufficiency, Swadeshi, and eventually led India to autonomy, Swaraji. Therefore, it can be concluded that the cloth converted Indias economic and political identity.