A Fashionable Century. Rachel Silberstein

      FASHION AND CHINESE HISTORY

      GIVEN THE COUNTLESS English-language catalogs of Chinese dress filled with page after page of dragon robes and rank badges, it is unsurprising that the denial of fashion in Chinese history has proved persistent. Witness French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky: “In China, women’s dress underwent no real transformation between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.”¹ Or British historian Neil McKendrick: “In China . . . in 1793 a traveller confirmed the lack of change when he wrote ‘. . . the form of clothing is rarely changed by fashion or whim. . . . Even the women have scarcely new fashions.’”² Even historian Kenneth Pomeranz posited a decline of fashion during the mid-Qing, arguing that women were more likely to engage in social competition and personal expression through poetry than fashionable clothes.³ Studies of Chinese historical fashion remain isolated from studies of European fashion, whose historians rarely acknowledge the existence of fashion in China or Asia, or consider what comparisons between China and Europe might bring to our understanding of fashion.⁴

      This impasse is, to some degree, a more general problem: many scholars view claims of fashion in non-Western cultures as an invalid application of a Western framework.⁵ Western cultural specificity is not necessarily inherent to basic definitions of fashion: “It is a system of dress found in societies where social mobility is possible; it has its own particular relations of production and consumption, again found in a particular society; it is characterised by logic of regular and systematic change.”⁶ But for this definition’s author, sociologist Joanne Entwhistle, and others, fashion is geographically and historically specific to early modern Europe; accordingly, other types of fashion occurring in other types of societies and cultures must be excluded. Countries and cultures positioned outside this time and place have been left with two alternative terms, folk costume and anti-fashion, neither of which can be coherently applied to Qing China.

      Folk costume is defined as that in which any change is so slow as to be barely perceptible even to the wearers themselves. As the semiotic ethnographer Petr Bogatyrev (1893–1971) put it: “Folk costume is in many ways the antithesis of clothing which is subject to fashion changes.”⁷ That Qing China does not fit the folk-costume characterization is evident in the widespread and shifting usage of fashion terms to describe 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