This study interprets Siberian shaman costumes from the perspective of Siberian shamanism’s spiritual culture by combining theoretical and empirical studies. According to the natural environment and language families, the Siberian people are classified into the Altai, Tungus, Ural, and Paleo-Siberian groups. Se Yin’s research classifies the spiritual culture of Siberian shamanism as cosmic, spiritual, and nature view. Eliade’s research has divided Siberian shaman costumes into form, headdress, and ornament. According to the present study, shaman costume form and decoration reflect the Siberian three-tiered cosmic view, such that the shaman’s head, body and feet correspond to the upperworld, middleworld and underworld. In addition, animism, totemism and ancestral worship appear in the shamanism’s spiritual view. For example, the costume’s form shows the totem of each tribe, while the costume accessories reflect animal worship, plant worship and ancestral worship. Finally, shamanism’s nature view mainly manifests through three processes: personification, deification, and ethics. As an intermediary between man and the spirits, shaman use their clothing to reproduce the image of half man and half spirit. The shaman’s costumes are deified and considered to have divine power. For example, the animals represented on the costume help the shaman travel through space. Generally, good animals help a shaman enter the upperworld, while animals that help a shaman enter the underworld are considered evil. Also, the number of hanging accessories represents the shaman’s ability.

The areas of fashion research and fashion design aesthetics & fashion history have been studied under a common research heading as a Humanities subject in the UK and the USA, and as Clothing and Textiles Studies in Korea. The purpose of this paper was to analyze the 2004~2013 research tendencies in terms of reporting methods and contents from 181 world-renowned Fashion Theory research papers within the UK and USA fashion research corpus, and 359 Korean research papers from The Research Journal of Costume Culture related to fashion design aesthetics & costume history field. The subject areas, periods, methodologies, and differences in the topics of the studies were examined. The results of the research are as follows. Regarding the research authorship and length of the research papers, in Fashion Theory most papers were written by a single English-speaking or other foreign language-speaking author and were on average longer than 21 pages, while in The Research Journal of Costume Culture, many papers were jointly written by two Korean researchers and were between 11 and 20 pages. Regarding the content, Fashion Theory was connected to relatively wide and diverse periodical and regional boundaries including the body, clothing, the fashion media, and the overall fashion system, while The Research Journal of Costume Culture revolved around the body and clothing, textiles, the fashion media, and costumes. In addition, since the late 20th century, the studies appeared to be related to the current Western world overall or to the country of the author. Regarding the research methodology, Fashion Theory used diverse research subjects and methodologies, and research was conducted on topics relating to fashion culture or fashion aesthetics. On the other hand, The Research Journal of Costume Culture featured relatively more dynamic studies aimed at suggesting developments or solutions to problems. It was found that a large share of that research focused on detailed style analyses and suggestions for aspects such as design elements and design developments. Such differences are considered to be caused by the inherent differences between the academic departments for the Humanities, and the Human Ecology. The above research results are expected to provide fundamental information in setting a direction for future research to assist the globalization of domestic research.