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2 results

  • 3 - Making Zhifu

  • Antonia Finnane, University of Melbourne
  • Book:
    How to Make a Mao Suit
    Published online:
    20 July 2023
    Print publication:
    03 August 2023, pp 79-106

  • Summary

    Chapter 3 surveys the range of zhifu (‘uniforms’) made and worn in the Mao years, showing that they quickly replaced the long gown as dress for men in urban contexts.Countering claims that there were no official laws or regulations governing dress in China, this chapter argues that protocols governing work dress constituted a regulatory system. The reorganization of the workforce provided an administrative framework within which making and wearing of zhifu was both encouraged and expected. Once major institutions in education, communications and industry were taken over by the new state, it was to be expected that dress for staff would show similarities across the spectrum of workplaces. Once planning prioritized the production of zhifu, its domination of the clothing supply was assured.

How to Make a Mao Suit
  • Clothing the People of Communist China, 1949–1976
  • Antonia Finnane
  • Published online:
    20 July 2023
    Print publication:
    03 August 2023
  • When the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, new clothing protocols for state employees resulted in far-reaching changes in what people wore. In a pioneering history of dress in the Mao years (1949–1976), Antonia Finnane traces the transformation, using industry archives and personal stories to reveal a clothing regime pivoted on the so-called 'Mao suit'. The time of the Mao suit was the time of sewing schools and sewing machines, pattern books and homemade clothes. It was also a time of close economic planning, when rationing meant a limited range of clothes made, usually by women, from limited amounts of cloth. In an area of scholarship dominated by attention to consumption, Finnane presents a revisionist account focused instead on production. How to Make a Mao Suit provides a richly illustrated account of clothing that links the material culture of the Mao years to broader cultural and technological changes of the twentieth century.