Thesis: Accidental Career Girl to Working Mother of the Year: Her World Magazine and the Construction of Singaporean Women’s Identities, 1974-1990
Supervisor: Dr Rebecca Arnold
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.
Education
PhD Candidate, History of Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, October 2018 to present
Master of Arts in History of Art (Distinction), The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, Special Option: History of Dress, October 2012 to July 2013
Postgraduate Diploma in Education (Credit), National Institute of Education, Singapore, July 2008 to June 2009
Bachelor of Arts (Honours), 2nd Class (Upper), National University of Singapore, Major in History, Minor in English Studies; University Scholars Programme, August 2004 to April 2008
Research Interests
- Dress and Identity
- Dress and the Body
- Dress and the Everyday
- Women’s Magazines
- Southeast Asian Fashion Histories
- Intersections of Fashion and Art
- Business of Art in Asia
Grant
LASALLE College of the Arts Singapore Academic Qualification Funding Scheme
Published Writing
“Country Review: Singapore”, Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, Bloomsbury Fashion Central
“Asian Influences in Fashion Design”, Fashion Photography Archive, Bloomsbury Fashion Central
Recent Conference Presentations
“Cut, Arrange, Paste: Stolen, Ong Shunmugam and the Singapore Fashion Identity” at the Critical Fashion Studies Conference, University of Melbourne, February 2020
“Looking In/Out: Designing (Southeast) Asian Fashion for Women since 2011” at the Association of Dress Historians International Conference, October 2017
“Fashioning Multiracialism: The Modern Singapore Woman in Her World Magazine in the 1960s” at the Textual Fashion Conference, University of Brighton, July 2015