A Chronicle of Changing Clothes

Photo: Courtesy Chen Mi Ji Cultural Production Co. Ltd.

The Fragrance of Jasmine Tea: Feng Biluo and Yan Ziye, 1943

Translator's Introduction

Appearing for the first time in the January 1943 issue of the XXth Century, an English-language journal published in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, Eileen Chang's "Chinese Life and Fashions" has become an inevitable touchstone for scholars of modern Chinese fashion and a key text in modern Chinese cultural studies by one of the most celebrated of all modern Chinese writers. A brief introductory note for the piece, penned by the journal's editor in chief, Axis apologist Klaus Mehnert, somewhat unwittingly suggests both the compelling scope of this particular essay and the ambiguities and ambivalence of Chang's position as a cultural mediator, woman writer, and translingual critic: "This article needs no recommendation to the ladies among our readers; for them, the word 'fashions' speaks for itself. But perhaps we should mention for the benefit of our male readers that the following pages contain more than just an essay on fashions. Indeed, they offer an amusing psychoanalysis of modern China."(1) Less than a year later, Chang translated, revised, and expanded the piece for publication in a Chinese-language journal, Gujin [Past and present], retitling it "Gengyi ji" [A chronicle of changing clothes].(2) While much of the material remained the same, this retooling of the essay involved a subtle reconfiguration of Chang's authorial voice and self-positioning vis-à-vis her Chinese readers, who are addressed less as psychiatric subjects than as collaborators in a troubled cultural history that extends through the largely unspoken (but ever present) privations of life during wartime. It was this version of the article that was ultimately included in Chang's 1945 collection of essays and cultural criticism, Liuyan [Written on Water].(3)

The text presented here, along with original illustrations by Chang herself, is a triangulated translation into English of Chang's translation into Chinese, which attempts to mediate Chang's successive mediations between different languages, audiences, genders, and positions. What emerges from these textual complexities is a layered and finely grained articulation of the relation between history (intellectual, social, and political) and fashion in modern China. This is materialist history that takes a palpable delight in fabrics, in colors, in textures, and in what Chang terms the "pointless" yet crucially significant accumulation of details that compose the language of fashion. It also represents the rigorous application of a set of theoretical hypotheses concerning the homology between the social body and its apparel to the study of historical process. Thus Chang forges not only an expansive theory of the "fashion system" in modern China but also a strikingly novel mode for the writing of cultural history and social theory in modern Chinese.

The following translation by Andrew F. Jones of Eileen Chang's  "A Chronicle of Changing Clothes," first appeared in the journal positions (Volume 11, no. 2, pp. 427-441. Copyright, 2003, Duke University Press)

A Chronicle of Changing Clothes

If all the clothing handed down for generations had never been sold to dealers in secondhand goods, their annual sunning in June would be a brilliant and lively affair. You would move down the path between bamboo poles, flanked by walls of silk and satin–an excavated corridor within an ancient underground palace buried deep under the ground. You could press your forehead against brocades shot through with gold thread. When the sun was still here, this thread was warmed by the light, but now it is cold.

People in the past went laboriously about their lives, but all their deeds end up coated in a thick layer of dust. When their descendants air these old clothes, that dust is shaken out and set dancing in the yellow sunlight. If memory has a smell, it is the scent of camphor, sweet and cozy like remembered happiness, sweet and forlorn like forgotten sorrow.

We cannot really imagine the world of the past–so dilatory, so quiet, and so orderly that over the course of three hundred years of Manchu rule, women lacked anything that might be referred to as fashion. Generation after generation of women wore the same sorts of clothes without feeling in the least perturbed. At the beginning of the dynasty, because men were forced to show submission to the conquerors but women were not, women's clothing still retained the clear imprint of Ming dynasty styles. From the middle of the seventeenth century all the way until the end of the nineteenth, jackets with huge sleeves were perennially popular, giving their wearers an air of statuesque repose. The jacket collar was very low, nearly nonexistent. One wore a "great jacket" on the outside. On informal occasions, the great jacket would be removed to reveal the "middle jacket." Beneath the middle jacket was a form-fitting "little jacket," which would be worn to bed and was usually of some enticing shade like peach or "liquid red." Atop this ensemble of three jackets, finally, would be the "Cloud Shoulder Vest coat" of black silk, with broad edging patterned with stylized "coiled clouds."

The sloping shoulders, narrow waist, and flat chest of the ideal beauty, who was to be both petite and slender, would disappear under the weight of these layers upon layers of clothing. She herself would cease to exist, save as a frame upon which clothing could be hung. The Chinese do not approve of women who are overly obtrusive to the eye. Even the most spectacular virtues recorded by history–for example, a woman hacking off her own arm after having been touched by a strange man–however admired by the common people, always produced a vague sense of regretful unease among the educated class, who believed women should not draw attention to themselves, no matter the circumstances. The most spotless of reputations can be tarnished by exposure to the steamy breath of the multitudes. If even women who sought to gain distinction for themselves by such honorable means had their detractors, what of those who, in deviating from sartorial norms, did even greater violence to accepted modes and customs?

The strictest formalization prevailed in the matter of the skirt worn outside the trousers upon leaving the house. Usually it was black, but on festive occasions a wife might wear red, and a concubine, peach pink. Widows were restricted to black, but if the husband had already been gone more than a few years and the in-laws were still in the house, lake blue or lilac was permissible. The tiny pleats in the skirt were the strictest test of a woman's grace and comportment. Ladies of good family walked with such mincing steps on their tiny feet that, although the pleats could not be prevented from moving a little, this motion was restricted to an almost imperceptible quaver of the fabric. A pretty maiden of humble origins, unused to such attire, would almost inevitably create the unfortunate impression of being wind-blown and wave-buffeted. Even more trying were the red skirts worn by brides, which were festooned with innumerable sashes, each half an inch wide and tied at the end with a little bell. The bride was to emit no more than a faint chime as she moved, like the sound of bells coming on the wind from a distant pagoda. It was not until the 1920s, when gathered skirts with a freer and more billowy effect came into style, that these sorts of skirts were done away with entirely.

The slightest deviation in the wearing of furs was also seen as the mark of the parvenue. Each sort of fur had its own season, and the distinctions were extremely precise. In the event of an unseasonably cold October, it was permissible to wear three fur-lined jackets, but in choosing just what sort of fur to wear, one had to consider not the weather itself, but the season. In early winter, one wore short-haired furs, starting with Persian lamb, purple lamb shearling, and pearly lamb shearling. Then one went on to "intermediate furs" such as silver squirrel, gray squirrel, "grayback," "foxleg," "sweet-shoulder," and "Japanese sword." Finally came the long-haired furs: white fox, blue fox, Western fox, darkling fox, and purple sable. Purple sable could be worn only by those with official titles. Middle- to lower-class people were much more prosperous in those days than they are now, for most were able to own a sheepskin coat or a "gold and silver" robe patched together from the cheaper white and yellow fur from the belly and back of a fox.

Photo: Courtesy Chen Mi Ji Cultural Production Co. Ltd.

Double Figure

Young ladies lent a spot of brightness to the gloom of winter months with their "Zhaojun" hoods.(4) In historical illustrations, the hood Zhaojun is wearing as she is sent off on horseback to marry the king of the Huns is of the simple, generous Eskimo type made so popular by Hollywood starlets in recent years. But the nineteenth-century version of the Zhaojun hood was absurdly colorful and gay: a black satin cap of the sort worn by men, but rimmed with fur and decorated with a large red pompom on top and a pair of pink satin ribbons streaming from the back, at the ends of which were sewn two little gold seals that chimed when they came into contact with each other.

An excessive attention to detail characterized the costume of that era. In modern Western fashion, various unnecessary details cannot be said to have been eliminated, but they always have a purpose: to bring out the blue of one's eyes, to create the illusion of a larger bosom for those who are deficient in that regard, to make someone look a little taller or a little more petite, to focus attention on the waist, or to conceal the curve of the hips. The details of ancient Chinese clothes, however, were completely pointless. You might say that they were purely ornamental, but then why were even the soles of cotton shoes inscribed with intricate patterns? There was seldom an opportunity for the shoe itself to be revealed to view, much less the sole. Even the slightly raised edges of the heels were covered with elaborate designs.

Quilted coats came with either "three pipings and three trimmings," "five pipings and five trimmings," or "seven pipings and seven trimmings," and besides all the pipings and trimmings, the front and the hems were studded with sparkling sequins describing plum and chrysanthemum flowers. The sleeves were finished with embroidered silk borders called railings, which came in seven-inch strips and were cut out to form the characters for "fortune" and "longevity."

This amassing of countless little points of interest; this continual digression, reckless and unreasonable; this dissipation of energy on irrelevant matter, marked the attitude toward life of the leisure class in China. Only the most leisured people in the most leisurely country in the world could appreciate the wonder of these details. It took tremendous amounts of time to create fine distinctions between a hundred lineal designs that were similar but not the same, and just as much effort to appreciate the difference between them.

Chinese fashion designers of old seemed not to have understood that a woman is not a Prospect Garden.(5) The heaping together of details will inevitably diffuse interest and result in a loss of focus. The history of Chinese fashion consists almost exclusively of the steady elimination of those details.

Things were not so simple as all that, of course. There was also the wax and wane of waistlines. The first important change came around the thirty-second or thirty-third year of the reign of Emperor Guangxu.(6) The railways, no longer such a novelty, began to assume an important place in Chinese life, and the fashions and fancies of the great commercial ports were swiftly introduced into the interior. The size of robes gradually dwindled, and wide trimmings and railings went out of date, replaced by extremely narrow strips of fabric. Flat piping was called "chive edges" and round piping was called "lamp wicking" or "incense stick trim." In times of political turmoil and social unrest–the Renaissance in Europe, for instance–there will always be a preference for tight-fitting clothes, light and supple, allowing for quickness of movement. In fifteenth-century Italy, clothes were so tight that they had to be slit at the elbows, knees, and any other joints. During the days when the revolution in China was brewing, Chinese clothes were nearly bursting at the seams. During the short reign of the "Little Emperor" Puyi, the jacket clung like a sheath to the body. And such were the wonders of the Chinese corset that even then the image of the body beneath the clothing was not realistic, but rather that of a pre-Raphaelite poetic muse. A slim, straight robe would fall to the knees, from whence two tiny trouser legs dropped a timorous hint of even tinier shoes attached apologetically to the ground. There was something infinitely pathetic about those pencil-slim trouser legs. In Chinese poetry, "pitiful" is just another way of saying "lovely." The instinct to protect the opposite sex, always a part of the masculine makeup, was perhaps given additional impetus by a difficult and transitional era in which the old was giving way to the new. Women, formerly self-possessed in their wide robes and large sleeves, found that it would no longer do to look complacently fortunate. Instead, it was to their advantage to act the "damsel in distress."