A Fashionable Century. Rachel Silberstein

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      FIGURE 1.1. A sparse illustration from the 1848 novel Dreams of Wind and Moon, showing the courtesan Fragrance and her client Lu Shu. Reprinted from Hanshang Mengren, Xiuxiang feng yue meng (1848; Juchengtang, 1886).

      Contrary to the assumption that Qing channels of fashion were visually dominated, oral culture provided a fascinating mode for fashion transmission: urban vernacular genres like “bamboo ballads” (zhuzhici) and bannerman tales (zidishu) form a rich vein for reconstructing the details of fashionable dress. The bamboo ballad, a folk-style poetic form composed of verses made up of four seven-character lines, gained increasing popularity during the nineteenth century because of its vernacular format and colloquial language. The genre’s preoccupation with city life offers an opportunity to explicitly engage in the question of locality in fashion systems. Like bamboo ballads, the Manchu bannerman tales were materially attuned and hugely popular in the mid-late Qing period. Both provide a critical source in countering the bias toward educated male elites in the historical record, which has so obscured female and vernacular communities.¹⁸

      Visual and textual analysis of these understudied sources enables investigation of the changes that occurred during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Detailed examination of mid-late Qing fashions not only negates claims such as Lipovetsky’s, who so blithely claimed that Chinese women’s dress hardly changed between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, but also furthers our understanding of how those changes occurred.¹⁹ We begin with a painting of a Manchu family’s birthday celebration in late Qing Beijing.

      Ethnicity and Fashion: Regulating Manchu and Han Women’s Dress

      “Family auspicious pictures” (jia qing tu) were a specialty of urban workshops. Figure 1.2 exemplifies the genre’s professional gong bi style—highly finished, densely colored, loving of and faithful to detail (the calligraphy from the famous preface to poems from the Orchid Pavilion Gathering [Lanting Xu] hanging on the wall behind the main male characters, the wheel-along elephant pulled by the center child). While this style earns it little legitimacy in the Chinese art historical canon, dominated by a literati art defined precisely against these qualities of detail, color, and mimesis, it is a fascinating image and richly informative for the historian of nineteenth-century dress.²⁰

      It is also a curious work. On the one hand, it is defined by structure and harmony, both within the family and between the natural and social world at large. Its vast size—nearly two meters in height and four in width—the smooth use of perspectival receding space, first introduced by Jesuit art interactions with court painting, and the viewer’s lofty vantage-point enables the artist to panoramically capture much of the family’s luxurious residence.²¹ The dull weather and fur-lined hats and robes suggest a winter’s day; the carefully arranged plants and the many floral reproductions in embroidered and woven silks, carved wood, and painted paper all convey harmony with seasonal nature. Four generations have gathered to celebrate the birthday of the family matriarch, a widow. Her three grandsons bring nine ruyi, a symbol of wish-blessings, to mark the occasion. In so doing, as with the prominent dragon-adorned carpet, this wealthy Manchu officials’ family was following court fashions, highlighting the relationship between imperial and urban consumption.²² The focal matriarch is accompanied by a daughter-in-law by her side; her two sons sit at the table to the left, wearing formal dress (li fu) of rank badge surcoats (bu fu) and winter hats (ji fu guan).²³ Three younger men, presumably their sons, stand to their right, wearing the rank badges of middling-level civil officials.²⁴ Three younger women, their wives, stand to their right. Six young children punctuate the piece, each attended by a maid, whose dress and stance mark her as inferior. Rather than size (a conventional visual strategy in Chinese painting to convey social status), here it is facial exposure: whereas the family members, both adults and children, are shown in full-frontal poses, the maids are all shown immersed in caring for their charges, with their faces turned away to varying degrees.