Chinese Fashion

Fashion speaks to communities beyond borders, involving interlingual
processes and translations across cultures, media, and industrial and commercial sectors. This special issue explores East Asian fashion as a multifaceted process of cultural translation. Contributions to this special issue are drawn from the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded network project, ‘Fashion and Translation: Britain, Japan, China, Korea’ (2014–15),1 and the following articles investigate the role of clothing fashion as a powerful and pervasive cultural intermediary within East Asia as well as between East Asian and European cultures. Thinking about East Asia through transnational fashion allows us to analyse creative and cultural distinctiveness in relation to imitation, transformation and exchange, and to look for dialogues, rather than oppositions,between the global and the local. This approach is not only useful but also essential in a world that has been connected by textile trading networks for millennia, and yet feels increasingly characterized by the transnational and by globalized communication. As Sam Maher has asserted, ‘[f]ew industries weave together the lives of people from all corners of the globe to quite the extent that the textile and garment industries do’ (2015–16: 11). The planet is connected through everyday clothing choices, and for millions of people the industry also provides their livelihood.

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?

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.

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.

The Han Dress Revival Movement, or Hanfu Movement for short, strives for restoring widespread acceptance and practice of wearing traditional Han Chinese dress that was banned prior to the Manchu Qing dynasty in 1644 and later averted due to Westernization in the 20th Century. With Chinese understanding of the clothing at a blank slate after three and a half centuries of disuse, adapting the dress into modernity and daily life sparked heated controversy. Parties defending designs from certain periods ("dynasties") clashed with each other as well as the moderates who suggested magnanimous acceptance of all period designs. More influential than verbal (or textual) debate was demonstration: Each faction rallied support through presenting modern replicas of such period designs, made publicly accessible as commercially available products for purchase. The earliest group to capitalize on this advantage was the Ming subgroup, who marketed replica Ming-era (1368-1644) garb as high-end products, and soon gained popularity and acclaim as the "most historically informed" design. With synthetic materials and mechanized weaving and sewing, what material and design contexts are different with modern "Ming-style" clothing with actual specimens from the historical era? What elements or sum of contexts constitute a qualifying "Ming" piece and how much personal liberty can be taken? What can the evolution from early 21st Century hanfu, extrapolated from Chinese opera costume and paintings, to the Ming-style prevalent present say for fashion development of traditional dress? How has the rediscovery of Ming fashion aesthetics contributed to the understanding of Han clothing itself? This paper attempts to draw together contemporary theories of fashion, social media usage and business to witness an internal evolution of the hanfu subculture, in turn speculate on Chinese perspectives towards dress, selectiveness on the perception of history and heritage, and defining boundaries on innovation within its tradition.

Contrary to conventional Western thought, over the last two hundred years of Qing rule, Chinese women’s dress underwent substantial change. Loose layers became more structured, robes and skirts widened in cut, and emphasis shifted from the ground fabric to creating decorative harmonies and dissonance through borders, sleeves, and collars. This paper argues that the growth of professional embroidery (shangpinxiu) was pivotal to these developments.

The flourishing of shangpinxiu over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created complex producer systems spanning urban guilds, commercial workshops, pattern-drafters, intermediary agents, and sub-contracted female embroiderers. Along with official attire, ceremonial props, and theatrical costume, professional workshops centred their output on embroidered accessories like cloud collars or border sets. For the female consumer, the widespread dissemination of these articles created a more attainable forum for fashion; for the male commentator, this trend was viewed as ridiculous and wasteful.

Combining analysis of guild, gazetteer and biji texts with close object study, I suggest that the predominance of embroidered components in late Qing fashions derived from the specialization and modularization that characterized professional embroidery production systems. Further, I seek to explicate the vociferous criticism of this fashion trend in terms of the potential such objects offered women. Accessible to both producer and purchaser, easily added or removed as the wearer wished, sleevebands and border sets often featured designs
inspired by print and performance. In this way, the commercialization of embroidery not only popularized fashion, but also served to connect nineteenth-century women with contemporary trends in popular culture.

China has played an increasing role in the world economy, and subsequently, fashion and luxury market since the end of 1990s. The build-up of the industrial production of textile domain, along with the great rise of consumption in both national and international markets, has obviously contributed to the flight of its GDP. This paper aims to present the fashion history and its recent development in China by giving an important place in the sight of their aesthetics evolution.

Please see the new version of the article in the Ying Xiang, a journal of asian cultures :
Part 1 in the link

In this article the thesis is submitted that there is something fundamentally wrong with Western Sinology, or 'Chinakunde', or 'Zhongguoxue' (as distinct from 'Hanxue', which is a kind of old-fashioned philology aggrandised with quasi- if not pseudo-philosophy). 'China experts' either pretend to be knowledgeable about everything related to China, in which case they cannot be taken seriously, or - eventually - admit not to be scientific all-rounders with respect to the country, in which case they cannot be called China experts. The author, who graduated in Sinology from Leyden University and in economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam, not only believes that the study of China has to be taken to a higher level (a belief, he expects, no tenured professor of Chinese Studies/History will share); he also explains how this long overdue task could be accomplished. The study of China should be neither mile-wide-but-inch-deep nor mile-deep-but-inch-wide; it should (and could!) be mile-wide-and-mile-deep. The heyday of Sinology is yet to come.

With a historical approach that contextualizes transnational and gender approaches, this study investigates how a second-generation Chinese American woman negotiated her identity as she moved to China and then back to the United States. Margaret Woo (1912-1982) was born in China and immigrated to the U.S. with her mother in 1914. Her father, Woo Du Sing, had immigrated c.1882 and settled in Minneapolis, Minnesota where he owned a restaurant. A classic sojourner, Du Sing built a house in his home village and intended to retire there. He died in Minneapolis in 1935, however, and his family returned to China to bury his body there and to live in the overseas house. As a young woman raised in America, Margaret disliked village life and left for nearby Canton to become a student at Lingnan University. She returned to the U.S. in late 1937 to escape the Japanese. This study is based on primary sources including interviews with Woo family members in China and the U.S., Margaret’s diary from her time in China, artifacts such as the Woo family house in Kaiping and a collection of cheongsam (qipao) dresses owned by Margaret Woo, and Lingnan University records. Historiographic issues addressed include the sojourner hypothesis, the transnational nature of early 20th century overseas Chinese who built houses in their home village, the role of fashion in exemplifying Chinese feminism and modernity, and the assimilation of second generation Chinese American female immigrants into American life.

Dress intersects with everyday life in a way that few areas of art history do: everyone participates in the fashion economy through the purchase and wearing of clothes, and even the most unworldly understand the sharp distinction in impression created by jeans and a T-shirt versus a well-pressed suit. This intersection with the quotidian, and with popular culture throughout history, provides the student of dress with a valuable vantage point from which to address a range of questions.
Edited by Nancy Micklewright, Ars Orientalis 47 considers key issues in the study of dress in general, and dress in Asia more specifically. These include the divide between the timelessness of “traditional” dress and the fast-paced changes of what we call “fashion”; the categories of evidence that come into play; the ways in which Orientalism has effected the study of dress; and contemporary approaches to the field.
The eleven articles in this volume feature diverse approaches and methods, applied to material that runs the gamut from individual garments, or a specific type of fabric, to representations of dress, and cover a wide swath of time and geography across Asia and the Middle East.
As with the three most recent volumes, Ars Orientalis 47 features web-based supplements to the printed edition. These include Digital Initiatives, a column that explores digital tools, resources, publications, and learning opportunities in art history and related fields, with a special focus on topics relevant to this volume.

#arsorientalis

From 1965 to 1969, some jackets shaped like Chinese uniform tops were called "Mao" in France, which aroused the fashion phenomenon of wearing "Mao" clothes and holding "Mao" activities in some groups of fashion circle. Based on historical document, magazines and pictures, this paper investigated the origin of this phenomenon based on the definition of "Mao" firstly. Secondly, it classified "Mao" into three categories and analyzed its characteristics. Finally, from the perspective of social conditions, possibilities and subjective incentives, this paper analyzed the causes of this phenomenon and drew the conclusions.

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.