A Fashionable Century. Rachel Silberstein
color, number of embroidered flowers and intended usage.
Whether fashion-seekers sought to imitate the style of the Manchu mansions or the Suzhou boudoirs, this dress-historical reconstruction demonstrates how ethnicity and place were critical to determining women’s engagement with fashion. As a microcosm of the Beijing fashion system, the Mactaggart painting suggests the ways in which both Manchu and Han women contributed to the fashion trends of the period. Styles like the chenyi and changyi enabled Manchu women to re-create their traditional narrow-sleeved robes, applying the broader sleeves, ribbon-embellished sleeve-bands, and ruyi-lobing found in Han women’s ao and shan styles. The detailed depiction in visual sources like popular prints and professional painting may be read alongside bamboo ballads and novels to reconstruct this consumption as an arena of creative autonomy for women. The images studied here suggest that, by the nineteenth century, both Han gentlewoman and Manchu nobility had evolved a valid mode for depicting themselves in fashionable dress. And yet, curiously, texts throughout the Qing continue to assert the courtesan’s power as fashion leader. To understand this, it is necessary to investigate the moral discourse of fashion. For many male critics, fashionable accessories, in fundamentally confusing social distinction, threatened a sartorial assimilation that denied more normative attempts to order. As an 1817 bamboo ballad inquired, “The young ladies of the famous brothels have faces like flowers, they sit alone in the scented chariot loving the bright yarn shades. Their paired sleeves are wider than one chi, neither Manchu nor Han style, from which family do they come?”107 Such critiques present a discursive force quite different from that of popular prints and urban rhymes, but they too shaped the Qing fashion system.
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