16 - Fashion in Ming and Qing China

Summary

Until fairly recently, fashion was viewed as of little relevance to Chinese history. It was not until the late 1990s that scholars began to challenge the assumption, demonstrated to have originated with eighteenth-century reports from Western observers, that China lacked the phenomenon of fashion until it was introduced by the West in the early twentieth century.¹ As BuYun Chen’s chapter in this volume discusses, these new studies of fashion in historical China were part of a wider trend to contest the association between fashion, Western modernity, and capitalism. This scholarship spanned cultural history, literature studies, and museum exhibitions, but it shared a desire to look to new sources, rather than echo the court-issued and official texts that charted regulation and control.² Scholars began to discuss vernacular and commercial texts that revealed histories of women and merchants, of entertainment and trade.³ Most of all, historians began to look beyond regulated court dress objects like rank badges and dragon robes, which had long fascinated Western collectors, to diverse objects including photographs, vernacular paintings, and prints, thus moving the field away from twentieth-century connoisseurship accounts.⁴