"That Pink Kimono!": Eudora Welty's Wartime Fashions

Abstract: Material wartime economy provides an important context for Eudora Welty's 1941 essay "Women!! Make Turban in Own Home" and her short story of the same year "Why I Live at the P.O.," in which the central clothing item is a pink kimono. This essay contends that the turban and the kimono as wartime fashion artifacts are not innocent clothing items but iconic markers of Oriental culture signaling a glamorous exoticism. How this exoticism comes into the foreground of Welty's wartime writing, the essay argues, is instructive of the author's political reflections on global power dynamics.