A Fashionable Century. Rachel Silberstein

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 silhouettes and styles emerged that shifted conceptions of fashion away from late Ming values. 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

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