Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China. Sydney, UNSW Press, 2007
One of the more interesting and fun history books I've ever read, it covers Chinese fashion from the late Qing dynasty to the present. There are really fascinating sections on queues, foot-binding, hemlines that (not surprisingly) go up and down, women's underwear, Sun Yatsen (or Mao or cadre) suits, hats and hairdos. Most, if not all, of these are linked to politics in some way - whether it is nationalism, gender, modernization, militarization, etc. A good deal of Finnane's argument is concerned with debunking the common western notion of stagnant China before the late 20th century (when people began to say "fashion arrives in China").
One chapter covers the emerging fashion industry in Shanghai in the 1910s-30s, from spinning and weaving to tailoring, retailing, advertising, fashion shows and design. Most of the fashions were reflected in the cloth rather than the garment. Finnane covers only one major change in women's garments - from a short jacket-blouse and skirt or trousers, to the qipao (better known in the West by the Cantonese cheongsam), the latter gaining true dominance from the mid-1920s. The qipao seems to have been based on the Manchu gown worn by both men and women under the Qing. It was gradually modified from a rather simple A-line to the body-hugging form associated with Suzie Wong, while the hem went up and down, collars became higher, sleeves longer and shorter, and the side splits became higher or were covered or disappeared altogether. The complications of women's fashions (exposure or not of arms, bust, legs, feet; hair cut long, short, permed or not) caused the poet Lu Xun to comment in 1927 that "A woman has so many parts to her body that life is very hard indeed." (p. 157)
The book has masses of wonderful pictures. To me, one of the most striking features exhibited in these pictures is the flat-chestedness of the women. In the late '20s there was a Short Hair, Natural Breast and Natural Feet Movement, but flat chests obviously remained popular for a long time after that. Boobs are not really evident in the illustrations, except for the advertisements (this one from Wikipedia),
until the 1950s, though Finnane argues that a distinguishing feature of a Chinese 'flapper' was that her bust was visible. That's odd because my mother was telling me just the other day about my aunt who was an Australian flapper and how breast-binding was a feature of that style. Global influences are evident in both countries (especially in the bobbed hair), but the bra didn't reach China until 1927 (I need to find out when it reached Australia!), so it seems unlikely that a 'modern' woman (active, outdoors, etc) would have given up breast-binding earlier than that. For others, the expense of the bra was likely a consideration, while there are hints that the flat-chested look was naughtier!
The other striking feature is the androgynous nature of clothing - as Finnane points out you couldn't really describe people as 'cross-dressing' because there wasn't much of an established distinction between male and female clothing styles. When girls started going to school, they donned the school uniforms worn by the boys (the western suit) - seen to be not so much boys' clothing as school clothing. When women joined the army, they wore military uniform. But androgyny was controversial and seems to be associated with women's desire to be emancipated and 'modern'. There is a whole chapter on women wearing their "brothers' clothes."
The period of the Republic was a period of turmoil, to which Finnane attributes the lack of certainty about what people should wear.
The fact remained that when a national crisis erupted, women were sure to be wearing the wrong clothes. So it happened that when Japan invaded China in 1937, women's dress was immediately at issue. "For the rise and fall of the country, [one newspaper proclaimed] women's adornment bears responsibility."' (p. 174)Men did, however, share some responsibility for the country's reputation, if not its actual rise and fall. They had basically a choice between the Manchu gown (changpao) from which the qipao had been adapted, the Sun Yatsen suit or the western suit. Should a western suit be chosen, it was important that it was neat and clean, and the trousers properly creased, otherwise the lice would surely be lurking underneath and China would lose face. But the Sun Yatsen suit was the true nationalist statement to the outside world (even though Sun himself might have adapted it from Japanese school uniforms). What women wore when meeting foreigners didn't matter since they did not represent the national identity.
In the domestic sphere, however, what women wore was much more important and therefore controversial. After the 1949 revolution a lot of attention was devoted to what women should wear in a happy, socialist society. As Finnane says, emancipation was no longer a right it was a duty! From the outsider's standpoint, the revolutionary period in China probably represents the height of androgyny in dress (most obviously in the Cultural Revolution when young people went for military uniform - the genuine article conveying so much more kudos than the imitation version run up by mum - in much the same way that western youth of the same era were adopting blue jeans). But there was also a movement to establish a distinct feminine identity in clothing in the 1950s - a sort of Dior-ized version of the qipao and the earlier jacket-blouse and skirt. Interestingly, quite different styles were prescribed for urban professional and rural (peasant) women - a reflection of class distinctions in 'socialist' fashions. One of the factors that killed this movement off is that a Dior skirt required more cloth than was available in China, but the Cultural Revolution was clearly another one: when Mao launched it, he wore military gear.
After Mao's death and the advent of economic reforms fashion in China underwent another series of changes. As in the 1920s and '30s, capitalism and consumerism played a role, but Chinese history has a far less prominent one. While Chinese fashion designers have concepts like 'Chineseness', 'national culture' and 'cultural heritage' hanging over their heads, consumers are living in and for the present. In the marketplace some kind of decoupling has taken place in which there is no Chinese history of fashion. Nobody wants to wear a qipao anymore (unless as formalwear) and only foreigners are keen on designs that are Chinese retro. Finnane cites a Chinese designer who complains that his qipao-based designs were ignored, while a couple of years later French designers with similar designs 'made fashion headlines around the world.' (p. 283). This story is about the politics of the global fashion industry. For the Chinese themselves, retro means some earlier Western fashion, not an earlier Chinese one. I'm not familiar with the literature on the politics of western fashion so I don't know if there's a similar nihilism towards the past in other countries. But this decoupling also reminds me of the current Chinese attitude towards the built environment - crudely summarized as new = good, old = bad - that contrasts with western attitudes towards adapting and restoring antiquity to meet modern needs.
Nonetheless, Chinese are very conscious of their place as the Middle Kingdom in the world and what the world thinks of them. Early post-Mao fashion influence came from Japan and Taiwan - both seen as affirming a lack of dependence on Westerners. In the 2000s Korean fashion has had a big influence. Finnane argues that the Japanese and Koreans are actually mediating influences from the West anyway. If this is so, it is an interesting parallel with the garment manufacturing chain in which East Asian intermediaries have also played a crucial role. It is disappointing too because Japan and South Korea have very inequitable societies. Older Chinese women who refuse to adopt new fashions (still wearing the cadre suit) have explicity linked their dress to the emancipation of women, although the actual correlation between dress and emancipation isn't well established. There's a photo in the book (p. 199) of a military woman, a soldier for two decades who had 'frankly stated that she was "not much interested in women's problems," [yet] was put to work in the Children's Welfare Department of the Women's Federation' (p. 202) after 1949. Her husband, needless to say, remained a soldier. There is no sign that this reassignment of gender roles which, even in the 1950s, reflected global influences, is about to disappear.
