The Evolution of Korean Costume: Urban Korean Women’s Shift From Traditional to Western Clothing in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945

This paper is about the fashion shift urban Korean women made from the traditional hanbok (한복) to Western-style clothing in the colonial period (1910-1945). In this paper, I argue that urban Korean women shifted their fashion from traditional hanbok (한복) to Western-style clothing because of American missionaries and internal social changes rather than influences from Japan. For this paper, I looked at translated primary sources as I do not read Korean. These sources include magazine articles, cartoons, pictures, interviews with Korean women who were in colonial Korea at some point in their life, and missionary books that were written about colonial Korea. In addition to these, I looked at secondary sources that dealt with Japanese influence, American missionaries, and internal social changes. This paper is significant because understanding a population’s fashion and the changes it undergoes can give us insight into their lives and how they felt about certain topics like religion, politics, and new ideas, which are all discussed in this paper. This paper also highlights the significance of learning about the history of women, a subject that is too many times dismissed, belittled, and ignored.B.A. (Bachelor of Arts