dress and adornment: shishang (fashion);8 shishi zhuang (fashions of the times);9 shi zhuang (fashionable dress);10 shi yang (lit., “style of the times”);11 xin shi shi (lit., “new time style”);12 and xin yang (lit., “new style”),13 all of which suggest that fashion was of paramount concern to Chinese society.
Meanwhile, anti-fashion—which anthropologist Ted Polhemus defined as when tradition, religious practice, or countercultural policies cause forms of dress to resist change, largely wrought in the marketplace—is equally unsuitable for a society shaped by a huge market economy with enormous reach and impact, particularly on the social mobility that predicates his conceptualization of fashion.14 Though many fashion scholars would like to make a clear demarcation between anti-fashion’s pursuit of “fixed” styles as a symbol of continuity and fashion’s pursuit of dress as a symbol of change or movement through time, the obvious problem is the spectrum of possibilities between the two, a range suggestive for Qing society in which forms of cultural stability coexisted with forces of social mobility and popular culture.
Of course, there are pitfalls in overcompensating for fashion history’s Eurocentric bias: dress historian Phyllis Tortora’s definition of fashion as “a taste shared by many for a short period of time” dilutes the matter to a degree that it becomes hard to distinguish a fashion system from any other clothing system.15 But considering fashion systems outside Western Europe not only allows study of shared themes—like the trend for the exotic (xin qi, or “new and curious”) or vintage styles (fu gu, or “return to the past”)16—it also opens up fashion history to factors beyond Western socioeconomic phenomena of capitalist states, class structure, and industrialized modernity.17 Entwhistle states that it is an act of ethnocentricity to attempt to locate the fashion system within all cultures, but the ethnocentric act would surely be to suggest that the Chinese fashion system resembled that of Western Europe.18 As fashion historian Jennifer Craik observed, “There are fashions and fashions”: to define fashion as necessarily cast from capitalist economies is to imply a misleading homogeneity to fashion as a social and cultural force.19
During the 1990s, a new wave of scholarship began to challenge the assumption that China lacked the phenomena of fashion until it was brought by the West in the early twentieth century. Some scholars began with the original deniers, arguing that European travelers’ discovery of “unchanging Chinese dress” told us more about “the self-perceptions of an industrializing Europe” than what Chinese people actually wore.20 Indeed, given their restricted access to domestic quarters and female dress, these observers were hardly an authoritative voice, something acknowledged by more astute commentators of the period: “Fashion holds a sway in China little, if at all, less despotic that it does in the West, . . . though the uninitiated or unobservant foreigner may fail to detect the minutiae of change.”21
More recent studies have revealed key components of the fashion system in force as early as Tang China (618–907). Historian BuYun Chen showed how, as innovations in the textile industry stimulated new forms of consumption, women in and outside the court used luxury silks to “fabricate” self.22 Many historians have highlighted late Ming consumption, the beginning of the so-called second commercial revolution, when New World silver began to transform Chinese markets, in exchange for porcelain, tea, and silk.23 Historian of consumption Wu Jen-shu charted the excited reactions to new dress styles that fill late Ming writings, showing how literati society was rocked by the ability of the lower ranks to imitate elite dress, and their efforts to create new fashions in order to deal with this identity crisis.24 Cultural historian Lin Liyue also identified the late sixteenth-century period as a turning point, when fashion threw a once hierarchically stable clothing system into uncertainty. The ensuing attention to clothing was frequently blamed on women, as conservative literati turned to philosophical concepts to respond to the social anxieties created by dress.25 Working on a similar period, literary scholar Sarah Dauncey contrasted the early seventeenth-century satirical novel The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin ping mei) with didactic prescriptive images and texts to investigate how notions of frugality and luxury complicated fashion as status.26
These studies have amassed considerable evidence to show that Chinese clothing and adornment, from the sixteenth century onward, changed at a speed that dizzied its native observers. They have transformed understanding of consumption in a historical Chinese context and demonstrated how fashionable dress was used to negotiate changing social structures. But the emphasis on the Ming has contributed to a body of scholarship with uneven temporal coverage, something highlighted by Antonia Finnane’s detailed study of Yangzhou fashions, which underscored how little we know of the interactions between fashion and place in China.27 This uneven temporal coverage has limited understanding of how the expansion of the market economy and the commercialization of handicraft industries impacted dress production and consumption, or how the relationship between fashion and ethnic identity evolved through this period.
In order to shift the scholarship on Chinese fashion beyond this impasse, this book focuses on two major issues of methodology and temporality. Most scholarship has prioritized writings about fashion, while those using images and dress objects as sources tend to be from a museum background, presenting a context of official hierarchy and imperial consumption. The so-called Great Divide that separates the object-centered methods of the curator/collector and the document-based socioeconomic or cultural history of the university academic constitutes a methodological split that I seek to bridge.28 Of course, textual sources are crucial for contemporary responses to the changing styles in the late Qing: brush notes (biji), local gazetteers (difang zhi), and The Record of Carriage and Dress (Yu fu zhi) of the Official Dynastic Histories, as well as less appreciated vernacular genres such as bamboo ballads (zhuzhici), novels, pawnshop texts, and encyclopedias. And material analysis of garments will always be vulnerable to criticism for charting “every flounce, pleat, button and bow.”29 But integrating object, text, and image enables visual analysis to reveal significances overlooked by textually founded investigations, edging closer to the kinds of meaning these objects might have held for their consumers.
Temporally, historical studies of Chinese material culture have focused upon the late sixteenth century as a period when commercialization began to destabilize social hierarchies and, with them, conceptions of fashion and taste. But, aside from a short depression caused by the Qing dynastic accession, this commercial expansion continued through the eighteenth century, leading historians to describe China as comparable in living standards to Europe’s most prosperous regions.30 And it is in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that many dress objects—particularly celebratory styles, once confined to imperial or noble circles—became more accessible. Key to this process was growth in rural and urban handicraft production, fostered by the doubling of China’s population: in 1680, it was around 150 million; by 1776, it was 311 million; and by 1850, it was about 436 million.31 Though only 5 percent of people lived in cities, the remainder living in market towns and villages were increasingly brought into an entwined economy. People began to use goods made by craftsmen and women they did not know. Their own crops and handicrafts were now also sold in increasingly dense market networks. These changes were most visible in wealthy cities like Suzhou, Nanjing, and Hangzhou, sites of imperial and private silk workshops, whose products were distributed through interprovincial markets and overseas trade. Previously luxurious techniques of textile adornment became much more widely consumed. While the popular uprisings, natural disasters, and foreign interventions that punctuated the nineteenth century meant the late Qing was a period of immense social and cultural upheaval, such are the conditions in which fashion—with its potential for social distinction and negotiation—thrives. This period has conventionally been viewed in art historical terms as a “nonentity”: not only did museums not collect, but many studies of Qing art commonly stopped at the eighteenth century, though this has begun to change in recent years.32 Nineteenth-century China is uniquely challenging because it both completes the late imperial and initiates the modern period.
