Antonia Finnane has written a textured, colorful account of the transformation of Chinese dress from the Ming period through the present that fills what had been a conspicuous lacuna in the Western-language scholarship on the cultural history of China. Finnane recounts the history of fashion and sartorial practice since the Ming (1368–1644), demonstrating how commercialization, industrialization, and political transitions have all shaped the clothes worn by Chinese men and women. At the same time, the book contributes substantively to historical debates regarding advertising and consumerism, material production, and the social body in modern China.
The book begins, appropriately, by sketching the fluid indigenous fashion culture generated by late imperial consumerism and Manchu rule. Finnane argues convincingly that late imperial China had fashion, if not a fashion industry (chapter 3). By focusing on European views of Chinese fashion in chapter 2, Finnane also places indigenous Chinese fashion culture in global perspective, while explaining how post-Enlightenment Western commentators came to portray Qing dress as one aspect of a Chinese culture that they cast as unchanging and fundamentally different from the dynamic, progressive West.
The core of the book (chapters 4–9) analyzes fashion in the twentieth century, with chapters dedicated, in turn, to the militarization of dress in the late Qing, the Shanghai fashion industry, the qipao (banner gown), Republican men's clothing, fashion under early state socialism, and politicized dress during the Cultural Revolution. Chapter 10 documents some of the fashion trends of the post-Mao period. Throughout these chapters, Finnane offers nuanced accounts of cultural change, resisting reductionist, monocausal arguments. For instance, we learn that the qipao and the Sun Yat-sen suit (Zhongshan zhuang) both had ambiguous origins and emerged as iconic national fashions during the late 1920s through a complex process of modeling by the first couple, Sun Yat-sen and Song Qingling, and popular appropriation rather than political dictate, fashion industry imposition, or cultural inertia. Both styles were also situated ambiguously in relation to indigenous vestimentary precedents and foreign fashions, and thus could signal both modernity and cultural distinctiveness in subtle ways.
Similarly, the fervor for military uniforms during the Cultural Revolution grew, in good Maoist fashion, out of populist enthusiasm among students that was positively encouraged by Mao. By contrast, Jiang Qing's effort to invent and impose a new style of dress for women in the mid-1970s fell flat because of limited social resonance. In general, the book consistently shows common people shaping fashion through discrete choices about sartorial practice in light of changing political regimes, media exposure, and patterns of material production. This interplay tells us a great deal about how the culture of everyday life reflected and inflected large-scale historical processes of nation building, industrialization, and revolution. Its interweaving of the macro- and microhistorical means that this work will be of interest to a broad cross section of students of modern Chinese culture, society, and politics.
Focused as it is on fashion, the volume is full of images (189 in total), which are of excellent quality and printed on high-gloss paper. The density of images (more than one image for every two pages of text) creates a montage effect through the juxtaposition of text, image, and caption that mirrors in formal terms the modernist visual culture through which new fashion icons circulated during the twentieth century. The montage form invites readers to shift between reading image and text to actively construct their own interpretations of this rich work.
While focused primarily on dress, Finnane's research joins several other historical debates and initiates new directions of inquiry. For instance, her grounded discussion of issues such as breast-binding and ideals of bodily shape during the Republican period, as well as the increasing visibility of the body during the post-Mao period, contributes to a history of the body in modern China, while suggesting how much more can still be done in this area. Similarly, analysis of the Republican fashion industry adds to debates about advertising, marketing, and consumerism that hitherto have been dominated mostly by business historians. At the same time, the book's thoughtful account of how sewing and knitting remained common through the twentieth century in most Chinese households, even in the most cosmopolitan cities, suggests the importance of further work on household-based production in the context of industrialization. Finnane helpfully extends this discussion of design, production, and consumerism into the post-Mao period through analysis of the resurgent Chinese fashion industry. Yet her portrayal also reveals the complexity of vestimentary change in post-Mao China, as we enter the fourth decade of “Reform and Opening.” The fluidity and diversity of styles, which have varied dramatically by class, region, and gender, suggest that an ethnographic history of sartorial practice since 1978 would complement Finnane's contribution, adding a key element to our understanding of the history of everyday life in contemporary China.
Finnane has produced an impressive history of modern Chinese fashion and much more. It will be a vital core text for students of Chinese cultural history for decades to come, and it speaks to ongoing debates in diverse subfields ranging from the history of the Chinese revolution to the Chinese consumer economy.
