Qipaos, lotus shoes, and Christian Lacroix - oh my!
Valerie Steele & John S. Major, eds., China Chic: East Meets West (New Haven: Yale University Press), 1999.
I actually first read this book in the fall of 2004, since it was one of the few interesting & fairly recent books the Mary Wash library had. I originally purchased it this Christmas season as a gift for someone else, then remembered how much I coveted the book & kept it for myself (whoops). It's a lovely big book, chock full of gorgeous plates. The text isn't half bad, either. I'm actually just going to be talking about the Part I of this book for now, written by the editors - Part II is comprised of chapters penned by a number of leading scholars in the field of fashion and history, like Antonia Finnane, Dorothy Ko, and Verity Wilson.
The emphasis here throughout the book is not just fashion history, but social and cultural history - what does clothing tell us about a society? What insight does the colorful clothing found in Maoist propaganda posters vs. the drab reality of common clothing of the time give us? How about the qipao? Or a bound-footed Shanghai woman wearing four inch French leather high heels in a 1930s club? Or ...
It's an interesting approach to history and one that has certainly influenced me personally - Antonia Finnane's wonderful article on "What should Chinese women wear?" was one of those lightbulb moments for me in my study of Chinese history, and I suppose history more broadly.
In any case, Part I of China Chic is divided into four chapters (pp. 1-99): "Decoding Dragons: Clothing and Chinese Identity," "From Foot Binding to Modern Fashion," "Fashion Revolution: The Maoist Uniform," and "China Chic: East Meets West." The overall aim is to illustrate that - just like China itself - Chinese fashion is not an unchanging landscape stretching from Confucius to 1949; moreover, many of the artifacts Westerners consider quintessentially Chinese - dragon robes, the qipao (or cheongsam, the Cantonese term which this book uses), the lotus shoe - are relatively young in historical terms, and illustrate a great deal of influence from a number of quarters.
The main thrusts of the introductory chapters:
a) clothing has always been important in Chinese culture, though sumptuary laws, restrictions, and rank badges have, naturally, changed over the years; what constituted good and proper dress for a multitude of occasions is something that shows up well over 2000 years ago.
b) the distinction between "us" and the "Other" has always been important, and furthermore, dictated preferences for clothing and cloth types. Things like wool or felt were not traditionally worn because that's what those crazy northern barbarians wore. In affirming certain modes of dress as "Chinese," people resisted the foreign or barbarian influence. Sometimes - as when the Qing dynasty came in - this wasn't possible; forcing the ethnically Han to submit to clothing and hairstyle regulations was a more powerful statement than many people give it credit for.
c) Modern (pre-Communist) Chinese dress evolved from a number of influences, and even things typically identified as somehow quintessentially Chinese are Western in origin (the Sun Yat-sen suit, for example). Except for the qipao, that is (this book is interesting in that not all the contributors agree on the origins of the qipao; I'm inclined to go with Antonia Finnane's guess, as she is recognized as one of the tops in the field of Chinese fashion and history).
d) Fashion was a deadly serious business in Communist China. The Red Guard was known to forcibly remove 'unsuitable' clothing & humiliate the wearer. Still, as we can see in propaganda posters, there is almost a fantasy world of brightly colored, more fashionable clothing - how do we reconcile this with the actuality? The authors offer this interpretation:
The posters seem to say: You, the spectator, are now wearing drab blue, or gray, or green; but soon it will be possible for you to dress in brighter colors, colors to match the happiness of your circumstances, in a society that is just around the corner. In this new society, colorful clothing will be untainted by individualism, purged of the cult of appearances, cleansed of the stain of fashion; it will be colorful in the bright colors of revolutionary purity.
OK, that may sound a bit dippy, but I think they have a point.
e) Finally (and my favorite out of the first four chapters) is the discussion of "East meets West": what has the West taken from China. The answer is a lot - appropriating everything from Mongol-style hats to the qipao. They also have a discussion of several Asian fashion designers and how they bring their own experiences to the table (frequently in very different ways from, say, Yves Saint Laurent).
Really, I think it's a grand (and very accessible) overview to how fashion can inform our knowledge of a period and a culture; they do an admirable job of skimming the long, long history of China, discussing things like class and rank, footbinding, fabrics, nationalism, etc. That is, it's quite a hodge podge of topics brought up - yet, in context, it works. An introduction that says "Here's what we're doing and here's why it matters." The gorgeous plates just add to the text - I swear this book is worth picking up just to nose through and look at the pretty pictures.
The essays following the introduction are (unsurprisingly) weightier, meatier, more academic - but this book still maintains an accessible tone, even the piece by Dorothy Ko (we'll get to that in a bit, but I was pretty astonished). While the intro is a hefty chunk of the book, and I do think it's important, if not as interesting as what follows, it's a solid foundation for the rest of the book.
I actually first read this book in the fall of 2004, since it was one of the few interesting & fairly recent books the Mary Wash library had. I originally purchased it this Christmas season as a gift for someone else, then remembered how much I coveted the book & kept it for myself (whoops). It's a lovely big book, chock full of gorgeous plates. The text isn't half bad, either. I'm actually just going to be talking about the Part I of this book for now, written by the editors - Part II is comprised of chapters penned by a number of leading scholars in the field of fashion and history, like Antonia Finnane, Dorothy Ko, and Verity Wilson.
The emphasis here throughout the book is not just fashion history, but social and cultural history - what does clothing tell us about a society? What insight does the colorful clothing found in Maoist propaganda posters vs. the drab reality of common clothing of the time give us? How about the qipao? Or a bound-footed Shanghai woman wearing four inch French leather high heels in a 1930s club? Or ...
It's an interesting approach to history and one that has certainly influenced me personally - Antonia Finnane's wonderful article on "What should Chinese women wear?" was one of those lightbulb moments for me in my study of Chinese history, and I suppose history more broadly.
In any case, Part I of China Chic is divided into four chapters (pp. 1-99): "Decoding Dragons: Clothing and Chinese Identity," "From Foot Binding to Modern Fashion," "Fashion Revolution: The Maoist Uniform," and "China Chic: East Meets West." The overall aim is to illustrate that - just like China itself - Chinese fashion is not an unchanging landscape stretching from Confucius to 1949; moreover, many of the artifacts Westerners consider quintessentially Chinese - dragon robes, the qipao (or cheongsam, the Cantonese term which this book uses), the lotus shoe - are relatively young in historical terms, and illustrate a great deal of influence from a number of quarters.
The main thrusts of the introductory chapters:
a) clothing has always been important in Chinese culture, though sumptuary laws, restrictions, and rank badges have, naturally, changed over the years; what constituted good and proper dress for a multitude of occasions is something that shows up well over 2000 years ago.
b) the distinction between "us" and the "Other" has always been important, and furthermore, dictated preferences for clothing and cloth types. Things like wool or felt were not traditionally worn because that's what those crazy northern barbarians wore. In affirming certain modes of dress as "Chinese," people resisted the foreign or barbarian influence. Sometimes - as when the Qing dynasty came in - this wasn't possible; forcing the ethnically Han to submit to clothing and hairstyle regulations was a more powerful statement than many people give it credit for.
c) Modern (pre-Communist) Chinese dress evolved from a number of influences, and even things typically identified as somehow quintessentially Chinese are Western in origin (the Sun Yat-sen suit, for example). Except for the qipao, that is (this book is interesting in that not all the contributors agree on the origins of the qipao; I'm inclined to go with Antonia Finnane's guess, as she is recognized as one of the tops in the field of Chinese fashion and history).
d) Fashion was a deadly serious business in Communist China. The Red Guard was known to forcibly remove 'unsuitable' clothing & humiliate the wearer. Still, as we can see in propaganda posters, there is almost a fantasy world of brightly colored, more fashionable clothing - how do we reconcile this with the actuality? The authors offer this interpretation:
The posters seem to say: You, the spectator, are now wearing drab blue, or gray, or green; but soon it will be possible for you to dress in brighter colors, colors to match the happiness of your circumstances, in a society that is just around the corner. In this new society, colorful clothing will be untainted by individualism, purged of the cult of appearances, cleansed of the stain of fashion; it will be colorful in the bright colors of revolutionary purity.
OK, that may sound a bit dippy, but I think they have a point.
e) Finally (and my favorite out of the first four chapters) is the discussion of "East meets West": what has the West taken from China. The answer is a lot - appropriating everything from Mongol-style hats to the qipao. They also have a discussion of several Asian fashion designers and how they bring their own experiences to the table (frequently in very different ways from, say, Yves Saint Laurent).
Really, I think it's a grand (and very accessible) overview to how fashion can inform our knowledge of a period and a culture; they do an admirable job of skimming the long, long history of China, discussing things like class and rank, footbinding, fabrics, nationalism, etc. That is, it's quite a hodge podge of topics brought up - yet, in context, it works. An introduction that says "Here's what we're doing and here's why it matters." The gorgeous plates just add to the text - I swear this book is worth picking up just to nose through and look at the pretty pictures.
The essays following the introduction are (unsurprisingly) weightier, meatier, more academic - but this book still maintains an accessible tone, even the piece by Dorothy Ko (we'll get to that in a bit, but I was pretty astonished). While the intro is a hefty chunk of the book, and I do think it's important, if not as interesting as what follows, it's a solid foundation for the rest of the book.