This meticulously researched, carefully argued, and beautifully illustrated volume is a takedown of museums. But esteemed institutions of connoisseurship ultimately play an ambiguous role in the book. While Silberstein cogently critiques the ways curators have reductively framed and frequently misread Chinese dress, she has plumbed at least eleven museum collections in the US, the UK, Canada, and China for visual and material sources: from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas, to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Most importantly, these collections have served as a point of departure for her deep dive into the production, consumption, and meaning of women's clothing in the Qing dynasty.
Silberstein's objective is to use fashion to reconstruct the vernacular culture of late Qing women, a culture obscured in museum narratives with their focus on high culture and official dress. She uses clothing not as an entryway into this ethereal world of courtly aesthetics, but as a barometer of social, cultural, and economic change. With methodological acumen and an exceptionally rich source base she succeeds spectacularly.
Her approach is based on overcoming the “Great Divide” between object-centered methods of the curator/collector and the document based socio-economic or cultural history of academia. She achieves this by bridging another series of divides between material, visual, and textual archives. Each of her archives have tremendous depth. The material archive includes dress, textiles, embroideries, and articles retrieved from tomb excavations, many of which she has closely examined in museum settings. The visual archive includes palace and vernacular paintings, popular prints, embroidery pattern books, and drama anthologies. The textual archive extends from local gazetteers, diaries, advertisements, urban rhymes, pawnshop texts, and household encyclopedias to numerous works of fiction—Plum in the Golden Vase, The Story of the Stone, The Legend of the White Snake—and the commentaries of individuals from the period, notably the nineteenth-century Shanghai writer Hu Shiyu. In many instances these archives overlap with one another: one fascinating example is Silberstein's examination of the ways clothing served as carriers of textual narratives—with scenes from fiction or lines from poems embroidered onto the body or the borders of a silk jacket.
The book is divided into two parts: the first, “Creating Fashion Through the Dynasty: Imagery, Discourse, Production” includes three chapters that focus on the place of ethnicity in visualizing fashion, moral discourses on outrageous dress, and the production of embroidered dress in workshop, boudoir, and village. The second part, “Plays and Poems, Fashioning Nineteenth-Century Decoration,” has two chapters on popular culture in fashion, and on the role of cultural authorities in setting the parameters of style and dress. The volume also includes four rich appendices which bring together rare clusters of primary materials: a dowry list, mid-Qing Suzhou clothing textile and accessory shop names, a late Qing commercial embroidery price list, and a record of guilds related to clothing, accessories, and embroidery.
Silberstein's key themes, vernacular culture and late Qing women, run through the entire volume and she has important contributions to make in both of these areas. In exploring vernacular culture, she uses fashion to examine cultural flows, the critical role of commercialization, and the process of democratization over the course of the dynasty. She demonstrates—rather than merely asserts—that there was fruitful dialogue between what she calls literary and popular culture, a dialogue that is palpable in a range of sources including courtesan literature, pawnshop guides, and ribbon-sample books. She argues that the flow of cultural influence is not necessarily top down, and that it is not only, or primarily, elites who innovate: guixiu, as we know from earlier scholarship, had been following the styles of courtesans from the late Ming dynasty. In examining cultural flows, Silberstein also highlights the aesthetic dominance of Han women's dress, again, not a revelation, but one that she deftly illustrates.
Some of the most exciting and fresh material in the book relates to commercialization. While a woman's self-sufficiency in clothing production continues to be prized throughout the dynasty, from the mid-Qing, dress objects first began to be produced in large quantities outside the home. This process involved the expansion of the market economy, the commercialization of handicraft industries, and the professionalization of embroidery workshops. The rise in commercialized fashionable consumption elevated the status of the tailor, expanded the role of merchants, and gave new importance to embroidery guilds. Under this rubric of commercialization, Silberstein also poses the question of how women—still discouraged from circulating in public—shopped (they relied on tailors and merchants as well as peddlers).
Rather than read commercialization as the crass commodification of elite style and an emptying of cultural meaning, Silberstein delights, along with her female subjects, in the democratization of fashion. With the production and circulation of pattern books, embroidery was no longer exclusively a genteel guixiu activity but one in which women from the middle or lower strata could engage. With an expanding repertoire of accessories including cloud collars and ribbons, women of constrained means could expand their wardrobes at a low cost.
This vernacular culture was not all ribbons and delight for Qing women, however. Silberstein probes the ways cheap female labor fueled the commerce of embroidery houses. While women were kept out of guilds, and the long-esteemed female practice of embroidery was masculinized by higher status male embroiderers, workshops continued to outsource embroidery work to poorly remunerated women. The embroidery industry continued to rely on these under paid female homeworkers well into the Republic.
Like all fine books, Silberstein's raises questions that one hopes other researchers will take up. The first is the use of the notion of fashion with its particular Western connotations in thinking about Chinese dress. Given the many different ways Qing Chinese women's clothing intersects with other aspects of culture—including written texts, a rich repertoire of symbols, and a courtesan aesthetic, for example—it seems to have deeper and more particular cultural resonances than the word fashion typically conveys
The second has to do with shifts in the very late Qing which Silberstein gestures toward but does not explore in any depth. As genteel women were gradually able to publicly visually present themselves in unprecedented ways through photography in the women's press from the turn of the twentieth century, for example, what changed and what remained the same in terms of moral discourses, the sartorial signaling of whether a female body was guarded or available, and the ways clothing narrated a shifting Sino-foreign culture? At the other end of the social hierarchy, at what point in time did poorly remunerated late Qing female home embroiders shift to other forms of public labor, as factory workers, for example?
Silberstein has given researchers working in a range of fields from economics to art history, and from vernacular culture to gender a tremendous amount of information to consider. The University of Washington Press also has to be commended for creating such a beautiful volume that fully does justice to a work that so artfully blends text and image.
