to the stream of male swagger embodied in robes and badges in this narrative of imperial might, women’s dress was rather sidelined in Western exhibitions—afterthoughts in an account of imperial power and male status.11 Where it was considered, women’s dress was framed as artistic, genteel, and static, as objects of “delicacy and refinement,” much like the Water Garden robe mentioned earlier. Both women and their wardrobes were placed deep in their inner chambers, apparently untouched by the processes of fashion or commodification that had, in recent decades, transformed the dress consumption of women in Western Europe or Northern America. Ideas that might have made these objects less “beyond” and rather more assimilable to contemporary understanding—commercial production, fashionable demand, popular design influences—were entirely absent from the Western construct of Chinese women’s dress.
Attributes of fashion and design were reserved for the Western fashion designer, who used these museum collections as inspiration. In the months following the 1945 Costumes from the Forbidden City, China, as defined by the exhibition, reverberated through fashion’s commercial institutions. The Textile Color Card Association issued its advance collection of 1945 fall rayon colors “taken from imperial robes of the Ch’ing dynasty of the Manchu rulers, and including: Pagoda violet, Manchu fuchsia, Ch’ing turquoise, Mandarin red, green Dragon, Temple jade, Forbidden gold, and Blue of Heaven.”12 Women’s Wear advised its readers to look out for “Chinese Dynasty Colors, inspired by the exquisite court robe” on exhibition at the Met.13 Marketing campaigns appealed to the more ordinary consumer to participate, by purchasing, for example, Chen Yu “Chinese Red Nail Lacquer and Lipstick”: “Lipstick, nail polish, and base coat are combined in a handsome package designed with a colorful reproduction of one of the precious Chinese robes in the ‘Forbidden City’ collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”14
To be sure, this dichotomy—Western dress as fashion, Asian dress as unchanging—begins far earlier than the exhibition of Chinese dress in the Western museum. The origins of the “myth of the absence of fashion in China” have been traced to the eighteenth century: earlier European travelers described Chinese dress in terms of similarity, but as both industrialization and conflict between European and Chinese notions of political economy started to gather pace, a discourse of difference became commonplace.15 Hence, assertions like the following: “The Chinese have a great dislike to innovation or change in their laws, customs, or costume; all that is ancient or been adopted by their ancestors is, in their estimation, good and perfect, therefore the national dress never varies—their fashions never change.”16 By the nineteenth century, as theories of Western fashion increasingly tied the phenomena to capitalism and modernity, Chinese dress was predominantly described as static and regulated.17 The site of the museum provided an ideal locus for materializing that myth—through processes of collection, exhibition, and scholarship, this contrast was more wholly formed. In reifying Chinese dress as separate and beyond and reducing it to palettes of red and gold and motifs of dragons and phoenixes, curators subtly reaffirmed the impossibility of a non-Western country like China joining modern Europe’s possessive relationship with fashion.
The notions of imperial power, official status, and ancient traditions that dominated these earlier accounts of Chinese dress continue to preoccupy collections and collectors. And yet, the China from which the garments originated was a society with a heavily commercialized economy and vibrant urban cultures. The garments’ exhibitory presence in Western museums was enabled by the collapse of that society—the early twentieth-century demise of the Qing empire, and the ensuing civil war, famine, and chaos that caused once wealthy and privileged families to sell their clothes. Contrary to the museum’s framing of Chinese dress and textiles, many collections derived not from imperial power and nobility, but rather the secondhand garments and accessories of Chinese people. The transfer of old garments to antiques shops, department stores, and later, museums in America and Europe, was a product of political upheaval, international conflict, the growth of tourism, and most of all, commercial trade networks involving art dealers and secondhand clothes salesmen.18
This movement of objects had begun with the earliest stage of Sino-Western trade (ca. 1680–1839), when foreigners were confined to Guangzhou (Canton) where they bought Chinese trade silks and embroidered shoes as souvenirs. Their long-standing frustration with this trade system eventually erupted into the Opium Wars (1839–42, 1856–60), which forced China to open to Western trade and diplomacy. These wars, along with the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), the Boxer Rebellion (1900), other uprisings, and a series of environmental disasters rained blow after blow on the Qing empire’s wealth, territory, and sovereignty. The “unequal treaties” (the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing and the 1860 Treaty of Beijing) opened up the treaty ports, bringing many more foreigners—diplomats, merchants, missionaries, and tourists—to cities like Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai. Dealers began selling the luxuries of impoverished families in the antiques markets of Beijing and Shanghai from the 1880s onward, and when the Qing dynasty fell in 1911, the market was flooded with the possessions of Manchu and Han families in dire need of funds. In this way, foreign residents and visitors gained access to high-quality handicraft objects: ancient and contemporary porcelain, cloisonné, jade, paintings, furniture, silk robes, and embroidered accessories.
By this juncture, Western interest in Chinese art had developed considerably: there were new institutions and publications for producing and circulating knowledge about Chinese objects in East Asia, Europe, and North America, a fast-growing volume of connoisseur knowledge and the beginnings of museum formation. The system providing objects to satisfy these new sites and interest connected curio-shop owners, pawnshop owners, auction house representatives, and petty criminals in China with dealers, curators, and department-store owners in Europe and North America. And yet, despite the reliance upon such networks, understanding and positioning Chinese dress as art depended on being able to remove factors such as looting, commercial tourism, or the secondhand clothing trade (gu yi). Instead, discourses relating to the imperial court and noble status were used to narrate and understand the objects: “personal requisites of court life in old China” or figural tropes like “Manchu lady” or “Chinese lady” that, critically, lacked attributes such as place, age, or socioeconomic position that might suggest the real life behind the discarded dress object.
These historical processes explain why hundreds of objects of Chinese dress, though first made and used in China, now reside in North American and European museum collections—the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas, the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and so on. Together these museums established a collective conception of what a Chinese dress collection should encompass: imperial dragon robes, official rank badges, religious robes and hats, finely embroidered lady’s gowns, shoes, and purses.
Accordingly, the earliest Western studies of Chinese dress were dominated by accounts of imperial and official dress.19 This bias continued to be evident in the numerous collection catalogs museums published between the 1980s and early 2000s.20 Still, many other substantial, lesser-known American collections of Chinese dress remain unpublished: the American Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. Western writings on Chinese dress were also brought to popular audiences by dealers like Linda Wrigglesworth, Jacqueline Simcox, and Valerie Garrett, who published sumptuously illustrated catalogs, nearly entirely absent of voices and texts from the Qing dynasty or studies by Chinese scholars.21 Historian Schuyler Cammann’s classic volume China’s Dragon Robes (1952) was unusual in integrating close object study with Chinese textual sources. But the dominant interest in regulated clothing for male elites meant far less attention was devoted to women’s garments or more vernacular modes of dress, even though such objects filled many private and museum collections.22
The
