the Dynasty
Visualizing Fashion
ETHNICITY, PLACE, AND TRANSMISSION
In the capital, all look to the princes’ estates for guidance [on] clothing and hat styles—they call this “style of the inner household” [nei zao yang]. Other provinces copy these as the latest styles: within a few years it is sure to reach Suzhou and Hangzhou, but by then the Beijing styles have changed again.
HU SHIYU, EXISTING OPENINGS (DOU CUN), 1841
THE SHANGHAI WRITER Hu Shiyu (act. 19th c.) confidently pronounced the imperial family to be the source of late Qing fashions. Yet, thirty-odd years later, the Zhejiang official Jin Anqing (1817–1880) argued differently: “The women all follow the Suzhou styles, and Suzhou follows the lead of the courtesan’s styles, and then [ladies from] those official families imitate these styles, though I cannot understand why this should be.”1 Who was right? Who drove the fashions of nineteenth-century China: princely estates or Suzhou courtesans? The northern capital or the southern cities? Addressing this question takes us into the heart of Qing fashions, to the interaction between Manchu and Han ethnicity, and the urban identity that formed a creative force upon the period’s styles.2
Modes of transmission in Qing fashion—the question of what kind of media functioned like the European fashion-disseminating doll or the printed illustration—remain poorly understood.3 Such information was evidently of concern to female consumers, whose styles were often described with the verb “to imitate or learn from” (xue), as in a Hubei bamboo ballad, which told of how the Jingshan women all say “copy the Suzhou [styles]: short jackets, wide sleeves and long gauze sashes.”4 And yet fashion publications as labeled don’t appear until the 1920s,5 and popular prints with titles such as A Fashionable Beauty (Shi zhuang meiren) date only to the late nineteenth century.6
MAP 1.1. China in the Qing Dynasty.
How can this absence be explained? After all, the ability to describe and communicate fashion is a crucial element of any fashion system. More than just disseminating styles, such media standardized markets, tying “consumers to clothing of one impulse,” channeling them into the same sartorial time.7 Accordingly, many of the seminal studies on early modern European dress and textiles have been concerned with the communication of visual and textual information: Chandra Mukerji’s study of how printing formed patterns of consumption, Daniel Purdy’s thesis that the impact of visual representations of dress made print culture more decisive than the industrial revolution in developing a German fashion culture, or Daniel Roche’s argument for the role of fashion illustrations in propagating fashion in a low-cost, accessible format.8 Yet our knowledge of marketing systems or other mechanisms of stylistic change in Qing China remains rudimentary, without explanation for what novelist Zhang Ailing (1920–1995) called “vast, unaccountable waves of communal fancy.”9 How did consumers, not to mention the embroiderers, tailors, and hatmakers who made their living from producing fashionable dress, gain information about “communal fancy”? What role did print culture play in mediating this construction of fashion?
The dominance of neo-Confucian values in surviving sources makes these questions challenging to answer. Since texts were primarily penned by scholars and officials, information on everyday lives of urban, mercantile, or middle-class groups is scarce compared to the “overdocumentation” of elite culture.10 The same is true of visual culture, though here it is not only content, but also style that obstructs the historian. Literati painting principles like the disdain for mimesis, expressed in the eschewing of color and detail of the impressionistic xieyi style, or the use of late Ming or Song styles to render the contemporary, hinder studies of fashion. Instead, exploring the transmission of fashion information calls for attention to less esteemed and less studied media.
Rather than literati painting, three typically anonymous genres celebrated the textures and patterns of the most fashionable textiles and dress: vernacular painting, palace painting, and popular prints. In his reappraisal of vernacular painting, art historian James Cahill defined the genre as pictures “produced by studio artists working in the cities . . . as required for diverse, everyday domestic and other uses.”11 Often produced in the detail-oriented gong bi zhong cai (fine line, rich color) style, these images are characterized by their attention to material surroundings. Particularly in the theme of “beauties,” urban workshops evolved a mode of colorful, detailed depiction that enabled expressions of fashion.12
Like urban studio painting, court painting often prioritized anonymized rather than personalized brushwork, mimetic rather than expressive depictions, and decorative values over philosophical meaning. Scholars have shown how court artists of the early and mid-Qing period were often closely networked to the urban studio artists.13 Art history’s tendency to denigrate nineteenth-century art means much less work has been done on the Daoguang and Xianfeng courts, though as shall be seen, their paintings of court women suggest fascinating connections to urban, vernacular art.14
Popular prints (nianhua) had a broad consumer base and were produced in a wide range of subjects and styles: from crudely printed and simply colored to finely carved, hand-painted images produced by the Tianjin-based Yangliuqing and Suzhou-based Taohuawu workshops.15 These commercial workshops competed through print-designers, brand repute, and subject matter; for both schools, women were a vital theme, crossing genres of history, drama, rural and urban imagery, and auspicious imagery. Like professional painters, prints also recorded contemporary material culture. They deserve more attention for their role in disseminating fashion knowledge and constructing ideals of late Qing dress. Suzhou’s reputation for popular prints was bound up not only in its reputation for handicrafts, but also the beautiful women who constituted such a sizable proportion of the subject matter. Similarly, Yangliuqing’s reputation for prints and female beauty was entwined—the most beautiful women of the north were said to come from this region.16
Finally, given that images and texts often present quite different views of Qing fashion, we might question the default search for fashion imagery as necessary component to the fashion system. Disparity is seen, for example, in the minutely detailed textual descriptions of the nineteenth-century Yangzhou novel Dreams of Wind and Moon and the sketchy drawings that accompany the 1886 Juchengtang edition (fig. 1.1). Here, a fifteen-year-old courtesan, Fragrance (Yue Xiang), plays the lute and sings “Full River Red” to her client Lu Shu, a prison officer’s son, newly arrived in Yangzhou in search of a concubine to produce a son to make up for his unhappy and unfertile marriage. The novel’s description of Lu Shu revels in the details: “He wore a turquoise blue woolen cap embroidered with gold couching. On the front was fastened a red-gold peony design decorated in kingfisher feather and inset with a crimson gemstone ornament. It also had a crimson silk knob on top and eight-inch raw silk tassels arranged at the back. He wore an egg-white gown of Hangzhou ‘foreign’ crepe silk with a corn poppy design, and over it a military-style formal jacket of foreign-blue wool lined with plain white damask and fastened with cassia-bud buttons.”17 Quite different to the generic male figure shown in the illustration.
