A Fashionable Century. Rachel Silberstein
literati (shenshi, jinshen), refers to the minority of the population who were educated and engaged in political or bureaucratic professions. Broadly defined to include wealthy nobility and merchants, as well as scholars and officials of all ranks, this group comprised an estimated 1.9 percent of the Chinese population (approximately seven million) in the late Qing, receiving about 24 percent of the national income (probably at least four hundred taels a year).39 The second of these groups was the mostly urban and often commercial middle class, which was more heterogeneous in income and identity. At upper levels it included teachers, head clerks, merchants, shop-owners, artisans; at lower levels, it included clerks and runners. But all these groups could supplement salary through family investments in land or business.40 More fundamentally, economic advances, expanded education, and limited official positions meant Qing society was characterised by social mobility, substratification, and social anxiety: there were downwardly mobile members of gentry families (lower degree holders, specialists and secretaries) who couldn’t access an official position, as well as upwardly mobile educated gentry-merchants (shenshang), scholar-craftsmen, successful shopkeepers, and artists.41 The mid-late Qing period is filled with officials and scholars bewailing the increasing silk consumption by lower-status groups like actors, courtesans, and servants, a discourse oriented around concepts of fashion, luxury, and fuyao (outrageous dress), positioned in opposition to Confucian virtues of frugality and simplicity.
Given that fashion served as a means of negotiating social divisions, simplistically dividing Chinese society into the cotton-wearing commoner and the silk-wearing elite belies the complexity of what lay between. Commercial weavers sought to meet middle-class demand with cheaper versions of expensive weaves and diffuse ranges of silk, cotton, and ramie qualities.42 Those living in proximity to silk-producing districts around Suzhou, Huzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and elsewhere would have been able to buy lower-quality silk garments and silk accessories. Hence, English botanist-traveler Robert Fortune’s (1813–1880) well-known comment about Huzhou: “Every person I met above the common working coolie was dressed in silks or crape, and even the coolies have at least one silk dress for holyday.” Still more pertinently, Fortune was struck by “all kinds of articles in common use amongst the people. Embroidered shoes, hats, caps, umbrellas . . . every conceivable article.”43 These low-cost objects fit historian Cissie Fairchild’s definition of populuxe, the fans, umbrellas, and stockings that became central components in allowing the expanding consumption of lower-middle classes in eighteenth-century Paris.44 Despite the European dress historian’s insistence that fashion means changes in silhouettes (contributing to an inability to detect such changes in Chinese dress), these humble objects were central to nineteenth-century fashion change and key enablers in the spread of fashionable consumption beyond elite groups. Yet, the growth in commercial workshops’ economic clout correlates to the growth in moral outcry seeking to control this consumption: how far did this tension—between the didacticism of gazetteers and family instruction books, and the valorization of fashion of urban rhymes and vernacular novels—shape the Qing fashion system?
Rather than the monolithic “Chinese dress” established in the museum, nineteenth-century fashions existed both within and between social groups, requiring work on “constructions of fashionability across social divides.”45 Doubtless this shift from an “honorific vestimentary system,” centered upon courtly consumption and sumptuary regulations, to a “fashion system,” enabling more personal choice and individual taste, still omitted vast sections of Qing society, but equally it allowed many more the possibilities of “self-enhancement through cloth and clothing.”46 The museum collection does not allow for the definition of regional variations of these consumption practices in material terms. One of the corollaries of Western collecting of Chinese dress was a confounding of regional dress histories: objects were rarely cataloged with any information regarding purchase or production location. Indeed, the processes outlined in the preface mean that information regarding collecting circumstances was often omitted from accession records. Whether purchased in Shanghai, Beijing, or Guangzhou, Chinese dress was simply Chinese dress, and collectors rarely recorded how they acquired their purchases. Accordingly, this book is a study of the Chinese fashion system as a whole rather than the fashion system of Shanghai or Beijing. The focus is the cities of Jiangnan, the area south of the Yangzi River that was China’s wealthiest and most commercialized region, but I also make comparisons and connections to the political center, Beijing, and two other heavily commercialized regions, Guangzhou and Sichuan. This broad approach has its limitations—particularly in providing a material counterpart to the regionality that texts suggest was integral to the fashion system—but it enables investigation of the ways in which fashionable consumption in diverse regions was integrated through interprovincial trade and print culture.
Despite the importance of handicraft to understanding the progression of the Qing economy and the integration of Chinese culture, historians of China have tended to disdain objects as valid historical enquiry. The following assertion from historian David Johnson gives a sense of their presumed limitation: “Values can be embodied in nonverbal symbols, and exemplified in behavior, but to be communicated with any precision, or to be explained, they must find expression in words.”47 But by grounding these typically unprovenanced objects within written and visual descriptions and associations, I seek to recover an experience that has been largely written out of the formal textual canon. In bringing together the material archive of dress, textiles, and embroideries, the visual archive of prints, paintings, and pattern books, and the textual archive of local gazetteers, contemporary diaries, advertisements, urban rhymes, and pawnshop texts, I aim to reconstruct something of the vernacular culture of late Qing women. In using an interdisciplinary approach spanning art history, anthropology, dress history, and fashion theory to read back and forth between object, image, and text, I seek to position and understood each source within its generic constraints and audience expectations, while defending the validity of objects and images to inform upon historical experience. There are limits to how far objects can inform: garments cannot be read as a text, and the so-called language of dress (language as structural model for dress semiotics) has arguably obstructed rather than aided our understanding of clothing as system of cultural signification.48 Still, objects are not silent witnesses to the past: the forms, materials, and adornments of late Qing dress have much to tell us about their wearers and makers. But it is by returning them to that past—surrounding them with pattern-books, urban rhymes, shop brands, popular prints, and fictional descriptions—that their perspective is most fully voiced, not only because this allows us to understand how the objects were made and used, and how they moved through society, but more fundamentally, because it was as “represented garment” that they acquired significance.49
To ask what it means to speak of fashion in a late Qing context is also to ask what differentiated these fashions from those of the late Ming—the focus of so much material culture scholarship. That is, when Li Ping’er, the maid-concubine heroine of The Plum in the Golden Vase, is described as wearing a highly fashionable summer outfit of “a lavender [lit., lotus color] silk center-opening jacket, and a white gauze joined-skirt with petit-point borders,” what distinguishes her outfit from that of Shuang Qiong, the courtesan heroine of the late Qing novel Shanghai Dust (Haishang chentian ying)?50 The latter, for her part, is described as wearing “a silver stove-red Ning silk half-new, half-old, tight-bodied, lined ao jacket, fully embroidered with eight large knots in aniline blue, with joined-lotus foreign [style] embroidered satin edging, [together with] West Lake–color five-silk gauze ‘scattered tube’ trousers with aniline blue satin edging and a gold belt . . . [tied with] two long trailing trouser belt strips of green gauze embroidered with ‘plum, orchid, bamboo, and chrysanthemum.’”51 There were certainly continuities between the late Ming and late Qing: Han women continued to wear jacket and skirt ensembles; the pleated skirt continued to be a key garment. And yet the two heroines would have likely looked upon each other’s ensembles with surprise.
The differences between each one’s fashionable dress stemmed from three factors. First, the Manchu dynasty’s (re-)introduction of ethnicity as a source of sartorial differentiation that produced new garment types and silhouettes, and new creative tension within the fashion system. As fashion became integral to asserting ethnic separation, new