Chinese Fashion

Since its beginnings in the middle of the 19th century, fashion has been narrated through multiple media, both visual and verbal, and for such different purposes as marketing and advertising, art, costume history, social research and cultural dissemination. In this light, fashion has represented an important piece of material culture in modern industrial urban societies and in postcolonial and non-western contexts. Today, we are witnessing a turn in this imaginary as issues related to social, environmental and cultural sustainability come to predominate in many areas of human activity.
The book addresses this challenge. By facilitating encounters between disciplines and cultures, it explores a multitude of fashion issues, practices and views that feed the contemporary fashion imaginary: local cultures, linguistic codes, TV series, movies, magazines, ads, blogs, bodily practices. The book deals with a paramount issue for fashion studies: how do the production and circulation of fashion imaginary come about in the 21st century?

Figural motifs have received little attention in Chinese dress and textile history; typically interpreted as generic figures in garden, they have long been overshadowed by auspicious symbols. Yet embroiderers, like other craftsmen and women in Qing dynasty China (1644-1911), sought inspiration from the vast array of narratives that circulated in print and performance. This paper explores the trend for the figural through the close study of two embroidered jackets from the Royal Ontario Museum collection featuring dramatic scenery embroidered upon “narrative roundels” and “narrative borders”. I argue that three primary factors explain the appearance and popularity of narrative imagery in mid-late Qing dress and textiles: the importance of theatrical performance and narratives in nineteenth-century life; the dissemination of narrative imagery in printed anthologies and popular prints; and the commercialization of embroidery. By placing the fashion for these jackets firmly within the socio-economic context of nineteenth-century China, the paper provides a novel way of understanding the phenomena of narrative figures on women’s dress through the close relationship between popular culture and fashion in nineteenth-century Chinese women’s dress.

This course explores the cultural landscapes of late 20 th and early 21 st centuries China and beyond through the lens of "popular culture." We will familiarize ourselves with some key approaches in modern cultural studies, while learning to critically interpret literary, cinematic, and visual texts in the Chinese-speaking world in social and historical context. Topics include popular religion and mythology, media and mass culture, food and fashion, the relationship between politics, nationalism, and popular culture, and China's global influence. We will emerge from the course with a new set of tools in thinking about "culture" both familiar and unfamiliar. No knowledge of Chinese language is required. All readings will be in English.

W. Ling (2018) Beneath the Co-created Chinese Fashion: Translocal and Transcultural Exchange between China and Hong Kong, in Wessie Ling and Simona Segre Reinach (eds.) Fashion in Multiple Chinas: Chinese Styles in the Transglobal Landscape, London: IB Tauris, pp. 123-49.