Nadya Wang

PhD student

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

Citations