A Fashionable Century. Rachel Silberstein
Second, the commercialization of small-scale textile handicrafts popularized new techniques and materialities. In particular embroidery, long a mode of adornment controlled by imperial workshops, began in the early Qing to displace weaving as dominant patterning technique. Rather than the courtly display and sumptuary laws that had previously confined embroidery’s decorative and pictorial qualities to elite consumption, market forces began to determine its reach. That we know so little of how handicraft commercialization impacted dress production, or the commercial networks through which embroidered dress was produced, reflects in part the conventional priorities of dress history toward art-historical issues of style and iconography. Museums sought to identify two basic production contexts for their objects: imperial workshops for dragon robes or female domestic work for women’s robes and accessories. The overlooking of commercial workshops has obstructed our understanding of the impact of fashion upon women’s lives and the role of women in handicraft industry.
The final factor distinguishing Qing fashions is the rise of popular urban culture that gave signifying power to the producers and sellers of garments, accessories, and prints. By exploring how popular prints and urban rhymes disseminated images and values of fashionable dress throughout China, the argument highlights the role of vernacular writers, print designers, and pawnshop employees, rather than the gazetteer editors and imperial chroniclers that have tended to dominate the textual canon. Popular imagery shows how the turn toward the commercial producer and the fashionable consumer impacted nineteenth-century dress objects. While connoisseurship accounts of Chinese dress typically emphasized auspicious motifs as preeminent, part of an age-old decorative system, interactions between handicraft producers and other urban craftsmen and women of the nineteenth century caused the emergence of new decorative themes: dramatic scenery and literati values, each underpinned by the normative auspicious motifs. Comparisons between embroidered dress, pattern books, and theatrical prints reveal print and performance as a major inspiration for commercial dress and accessory producers. It also suggests the highly sophisticated and referential ways through which dramatic narrative was rendered in late Qing material culture, and thus the intertextuality of nineteenth-century dress—the desire to reference and shape popular culture, and the importance of the clothed body as a site for negotiating these cultured identities.
Fashion in Qing China, as elsewhere, has often been dismissed as frivolous fripperies offering little import to understanding history. This book seeks to show how the development of Qing fashion correlates to, and illuminates, important shifts in Qing society, economy, and culture. Fashionable garments, pattern-books, and beauty prints may beguile in their decorative qualities—the bright hues and patterned surfaces designed to invite desire—but they speak to issues of central interest to Chinese historians: the question of how Chinese culture managed to be both “extremely diverse and highly integrated”; the role of commerce and publishing in spreading local styles and craft techniques across provincial borders; the contribution of commercial handicraft producers to local economies; and the use of notions like fashion and taste to navigate social hierarchies.52 As a “vehicle for communicating power relationships,” fashion offers a critical lens on cultural integration and social differentiation, both processes created through the same socioeconomic conditions.53 And yet because the prefaced and publisher-noted text remains the primary source, studies on these topics tell us primarily about literate male elites, leaving the question of women’s cultural roles outstanding.
In the decades since Prince Guo’s wife’s robe entered the American museum, there have been enormous achievements in Qing women’s history. Scholars have demonstrated that by the nineteenth century, the sought-after writings of “cultivated women of the inner chambers” were both published independently and alongside male authors.54 They have investigated publishers’ movement toward women readers: popular tales of romance and fantasy requiring lower-level literacy skills and “explicitly gendered female” knowledge—recipes, patterns, and pedagogy circulating in the form of household encyclopedias, manuals, and almanacs.55 This publishing shift was paralleled by “new constructions of womanhood” reflecting women’s increasingly varied roles.56 But if we wish to understand these issues from the perspectives of late Qing women, then material culture, particularly fashionable dress, for all its evidentiary shortcomings—no preface, no maker’s mark, no publisher—remains a critical and underused source. Here, by using embroidered dress to investigate late Qing women, I follow a definition of cultural literacy as encompassing “myths, stories, and symbols” to better characterize the range of educational levels possessed by women of this period.57 We cannot know whether the women who wore and made these objects were able to read and write literary Chinese (wenyan), but they were not culturally illiterate. Employing this more nuanced approach allows us to recognize the cultural production constituted in the wearing and making of dress, something elided in both the museum’s omission of commercial production and fashionable consumption, and Chinese history’s marginalizing of handicraft objects and vernacular texts. Rather than dragon-robed emperors or rank-badged officials, fashion in Qing China changed primarily because of ordinary people in workshops, shops, and markets—pattern-drafters, tailors, merchants, and most of all, women whose days were filled with the making, wearing, and imagining of these objects.
PART ONE
Creating Fashion
through 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