Читать книгу A Fashionable Century - Rachel Silberstein - Страница 14

GIVEN THE COUNTLESS English-language catalogs of Chinese dress filled with page after page of dragon robes and rank badges, it is unsurprising that the denial of fashion in Chinese history has proved persistent. Witness French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky: “In China, women’s dress underwent no real transformation between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.”¹ Or British historian Neil McKendrick: “In China . . . in 1793 a traveller confirmed the lack of change when he wrote ‘. . . the form of clothing is rarely changed by fashion or whim. . . . Even the women have scarcely new fashions.’”² Even historian Kenneth Pomeranz posited a decline of fashion during the mid-Qing, arguing that women were more likely to engage in social competition and personal expression through poetry than fashionable clothes.³ Studies of Chinese historical fashion remain isolated from studies of European fashion, whose historians rarely acknowledge the existence of fashion in China or Asia, or consider what comparisons between China and Europe might bring to our understanding of fashion.⁴

This impasse is, to some degree, a more general problem: many scholars view claims of fashion in non-Western cultures as an invalid application of a Western framework.⁵ Western cultural specificity is not necessarily inherent to basic definitions of fashion: “It is a system of dress found in societies where social mobility is possible; it has its own particular relations of production and consumption, again found in a particular society; it is characterised by logic of regular and systematic change.”⁶ But for this definition’s author, sociologist Joanne Entwhistle, and others, fashion is geographically and historically specific to early modern Europe; accordingly, other types of fashion occurring in other types of societies and cultures must be excluded. Countries and cultures positioned outside this time and place have been left with two alternative terms, folk costume and anti-fashion, neither of which can be coherently applied to Qing China.

Folk costume is defined as that in which any change is so slow as to be barely perceptible even to the wearers themselves. As the semiotic ethnographer Petr Bogatyrev (1893–1971) put it: “Folk costume is in many ways the antithesis of clothing which is subject to fashion changes.”⁷ That Qing China does not fit the folk-costume characterization is evident in the widespread and shifting usage of fashion terms to describe dress and adornment: shishang (fashion);⁸ shishi zhuang (fashions of the times);⁹ shi zhuang (fashionable dress);¹⁰ shi yang (lit., “style of the times”);¹¹ xin shi shi (lit., “new time style”);¹² and xin yang (lit., “new style”),¹³ all of which suggest that fashion was of paramount concern to Chinese society.

Meanwhile, anti-fashion—which anthropologist Ted Polhemus defined as when tradition, religious practice, or countercultural policies cause forms of dress to resist change, largely wrought in the marketplace—is equally unsuitable for a society shaped by a huge market economy with enormous reach and impact, particularly on the social mobility that predicates his conceptualization of fashion.¹⁴ Though many fashion scholars would like to make a clear demarcation between anti-fashion’s pursuit of “fixed” styles as a symbol of continuity and fashion’s pursuit of dress as a symbol of change or movement through time, the obvious problem is the spectrum of possibilities between the two, a range suggestive for Qing society in which forms of cultural stability coexisted with forces of social mobility and popular culture.

Of course, there are pitfalls in overcompensating for fashion history’s Eurocentric bias: dress historian Phyllis Tortora’s definition of fashion as “a taste shared by many for a short period of time” dilutes the matter to a degree that it becomes hard to distinguish a fashion system from any other clothing system.¹⁵ But considering fashion systems outside Western Europe not only allows study of shared themes—like the trend for the exotic (xin qi, or “new and curious”) or vintage styles (fu gu, or “return to the past”)¹⁶—it also opens up fashion history to factors beyond Western socioeconomic phenomena of capitalist states, class structure, and industrialized modernity.¹⁷ Entwhistle states that it is an act of ethnocentricity to attempt to locate the fashion system within all cultures, but the ethnocentric act would surely be to suggest that the Chinese fashion system resembled that of Western Europe.¹⁸ As fashion historian Jennifer Craik observed, “There are fashions and fashions”: to define fashion as necessarily cast from capitalist economies is to imply a misleading homogeneity to fashion as a social and cultural force.¹⁹

During the 1990s, a new wave of scholarship began to challenge the assumption that China lacked the phenomena of fashion until it was brought by the West in the early twentieth century. Some scholars began with the original deniers, arguing that European travelers’ discovery of “unchanging Chinese dress” told us more about “the self-perceptions of an industrializing Europe” than what Chinese people actually wore.²⁰ Indeed, given their restricted access to domestic quarters and female dress, these observers were hardly an authoritative voice, something acknowledged by more astute commentators of the period: “Fashion holds a sway in China little, if at all, less despotic that it does in the West, . . . though the uninitiated or unobservant foreigner may fail to detect the minutiae of change.”²¹

More recent studies have revealed key components of the fashion system in force as early as Tang China (618–907). Historian BuYun Chen showed how, as innovations in the textile industry stimulated new forms of consumption, women in and outside the court used luxury silks to “fabricate” self.²² Many historians have highlighted late Ming consumption, the beginning of the so-called second commercial revolution, when New World silver began to transform Chinese markets, in exchange for porcelain, tea, and silk.²³ Historian of consumption Wu Jen-shu charted the excited reactions to new dress styles that fill late Ming writings, showing how literati society was rocked by the ability of the lower ranks to imitate elite dress, and their efforts to create new fashions in order to deal with this identity crisis.²⁴ Cultural historian Lin Liyue also identified the late sixteenth-century period as a turning point, when fashion threw a once hierarchically stable clothing system into uncertainty. The ensuing attention to clothing was frequently blamed on women, as conservative literati turned to philosophical concepts to respond to the social anxieties created by dress.²⁵ Working on a similar period, literary scholar Sarah Dauncey contrasted the early seventeenth-century satirical novel The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin ping mei) with didactic prescriptive images and texts to investigate how notions of frugality and luxury complicated fashion as status.²⁶

These studies have amassed considerable evidence to show that Chinese clothing and adornment, from the sixteenth century onward, changed at a speed that dizzied its native observers. They have transformed understanding of consumption in a historical Chinese context and demonstrated how fashionable dress was used to negotiate changing social structures. But the emphasis on the Ming has contributed to a body of scholarship with uneven temporal coverage, something highlighted by Antonia Finnane’s detailed study of Yangzhou fashions, which underscored how little we know of the interactions between fashion and place in China.²⁷ This uneven temporal coverage has limited understanding of how the expansion of the market economy and the commercialization of handicraft industries impacted dress production and consumption, or how the relationship between fashion and ethnic identity evolved through this period.

In order to shift the scholarship on Chinese fashion beyond this impasse, this book focuses on two major issues of methodology and temporality. Most scholarship has prioritized writings about fashion, while those using images and dress objects as sources tend to be from a museum background, presenting a context of official hierarchy and imperial consumption. The so-called Great Divide that separates the object-centered methods of the curator/collector and the document-based socioeconomic or cultural history of the university academic constitutes a methodological split that I seek to bridge.²⁸ Of course, textual sources are crucial for contemporary responses to the changing styles in the late Qing: brush notes (biji), local gazetteers (difang zhi), and The Record of Carriage and Dress (Yu fu zhi) of the Official Dynastic Histories, as well as less appreciated vernacular genres such as bamboo ballads (zhuzhici), novels, pawnshop texts, and encyclopedias. And material analysis of garments will always be vulnerable to criticism for charting “every flounce, pleat, button and bow.”²⁹ But integrating object, text, and image enables visual analysis to reveal significances overlooked by textually founded investigations, edging closer to the kinds of meaning these objects might have held for their consumers.

Temporally, historical studies of Chinese material culture have focused upon the late sixteenth century as a period when commercialization began to destabilize social hierarchies and, with them, conceptions of fashion and taste. But, aside from a short depression caused by the Qing dynastic accession, this commercial expansion continued through the eighteenth century, leading historians to describe China as comparable in living standards to Europe’s most prosperous regions.³⁰ And it is in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that many dress objects—particularly celebratory styles, once confined to imperial or noble circles—became more accessible. Key to this process was growth in rural and urban handicraft production, fostered by the doubling of China’s population: in 1680, it was around 150 million; by 1776, it was 311 million; and by 1850, it was about 436 million.³¹ Though only 5 percent of people lived in cities, the remainder living in market towns and villages were increasingly brought into an entwined economy. People began to use goods made by craftsmen and women they did not know. Their own crops and handicrafts were now also sold in increasingly dense market networks. These changes were most visible in wealthy cities like Suzhou, Nanjing, and Hangzhou, sites of imperial and private silk workshops, whose products were distributed through interprovincial markets and overseas trade. Previously luxurious techniques of textile adornment became much more widely consumed. While the popular uprisings, natural disasters, and foreign interventions that punctuated the nineteenth century meant the late Qing was a period of immense social and cultural upheaval, such are the conditions in which fashion—with its potential for social distinction and negotiation—thrives. This period has conventionally been viewed in art historical terms as a “nonentity”: not only did museums not collect, but many studies of Qing art commonly stopped at the eighteenth century, though this has begun to change in recent years.³² Nineteenth-century China is uniquely challenging because it both completes the late imperial and initiates the modern period. Literary and cultural historians have explored how conceptions of fashion evolved through these decades of modernity and Western intervention.³³ But objects of late Qing fashion also have much to tell us about how the Qing fashion system functioned in a context largely absent of Western presence or industrial modernizations.

Thriving production and marketing systems, developed from internal processes of commercialization and urbanization, complicate established characterizations of the nineteenth-century as economically backward and in cultural decline. Part of the appeal of dragon robes was as dynastic embodiment: “Foreigners came to localize in dragon robes all the potentialities of a civilization they perceived to be as far removed from their own as was possible and to project onto the costumes all their personal aspirations of what a society should be. They took home these robes as tangible evidence of a myth.”³⁴ Curators interpreted nineteenth-century dragon robe forms as reflecting the waning that followed the heights of the Kangxi and Qianlong periods. Late Qing designs were described as of “crowded or pinched composition”; once “secure vitality and energetic movement” now “settled down into a mere crust of dull stodgy forms.”³⁵ How might we view this history differently if we turned not to the products of institutional workshops designed through state-controlled processes, but instead to objects produced in private workshops, designed by pattern draftsmen connected with other urban handicraft producers and influenced by local print and performance?

The museum collections from which I have gathered these examples of Qing dynasty fashion offer great potential, but they also possess limiting factors delineating this book’s reach. First, despite its claims of universal representation (“Chinese dress”), it informs only upon the consumption of the minority who could afford embellished and fashionable silk garments. Ordinary people wore mostly cotton and ramie, primarily dyed blue, much of it woven locally, sometimes by the wearers themselves. In winter they wore cotton padding and sheep skins while the wealthy wore furs and wools.³⁶ They probably owned no more than two sets of garments for winter and summer apiece, and of course the truly poor would have struggled to achieve even this. Though even poor women might have had a piece of jewelry or bright garment for weddings and festivals, in general, this group experienced little stylistic change over the course of the dynasty.³⁷

However, for a substantial minority, living conditions improved during the Qing dynasty.³⁸ Commercialization expanded the numbers of those who could access fashionable silk objects, particularly accessories. Thus, what the museum collection actually evidences are the consumer tastes of two main groups: upper class elites and the middle class. Elites, also called gentry or literati (shenshi, jinshen), refers to the minority of the population who were educated and engaged in political or bureaucratic professions. Broadly defined to include wealthy nobility and merchants, as well as scholars and officials of all ranks, this group comprised an estimated 1.9 percent of the Chinese population (approximately seven million) in the late Qing, receiving about 24 percent of the national income (probably at least four hundred taels a year).³⁹ The second of these groups was the mostly urban and often commercial middle class, which was more heterogeneous in income and identity. At upper levels it included teachers, head clerks, merchants, shop-owners, artisans; at lower levels, it included clerks and runners. But all these groups could supplement salary through family investments in land or business.⁴⁰ More fundamentally, economic advances, expanded education, and limited official positions meant Qing society was characterised by social mobility, substratification, and social anxiety: there were downwardly mobile members of gentry families (lower degree holders, specialists and secretaries) who couldn’t access an official position, as well as upwardly mobile educated gentry-merchants (shenshang), scholar-craftsmen, successful shopkeepers, and artists.⁴¹ The mid-late Qing period is filled with officials and scholars bewailing the increasing silk consumption by lower-status groups like actors, courtesans, and servants, a discourse oriented around concepts of fashion, luxury, and fuyao (outrageous dress), positioned in opposition to Confucian virtues of frugality and simplicity.

Given that fashion served as a means of negotiating social divisions, simplistically dividing Chinese society into the cotton-wearing commoner and the silk-wearing elite belies the complexity of what lay between. Commercial weavers sought to meet middle-class demand with cheaper versions of expensive weaves and diffuse ranges of silk, cotton, and ramie qualities.⁴² Those living in proximity to silk-producing districts around Suzhou, Huzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and elsewhere would have been able to buy lower-quality silk garments and silk accessories. Hence, English botanist-traveler Robert Fortune’s (1813–1880) well-known comment about Huzhou: “Every person I met above the common working coolie was dressed in silks or crape, and even the coolies have at least one silk dress for holyday.” Still more pertinently, Fortune was struck by “all kinds of articles in common use amongst the people. Embroidered shoes, hats, caps, umbrellas . . . every conceivable article.”⁴³ These low-cost objects fit historian Cissie Fairchild’s definition of populuxe, the fans, umbrellas, and stockings that became central components in allowing the expanding consumption of lower-middle classes in eighteenth-century Paris.⁴⁴ Despite the European dress historian’s insistence that fashion means changes in silhouettes (contributing to an inability to detect such changes in Chinese dress), these humble objects were central to nineteenth-century fashion change and key enablers in the spread of fashionable consumption beyond elite groups. Yet, the growth in commercial workshops’ economic clout correlates to the growth in moral outcry seeking to control this consumption: how far did this tension—between the didacticism of gazetteers and family instruction books, and the valorization of fashion of urban rhymes and vernacular novels—shape the Qing fashion system?

Rather than the monolithic “Chinese dress” established in the museum, nineteenth-century fashions existed both within and between social groups, requiring work on “constructions of fashionability across social divides.”⁴⁵ Doubtless this shift from an “honorific vestimentary system,” centered upon courtly consumption and sumptuary regulations, to a “fashion system,” enabling more personal choice and individual taste, still omitted vast sections of Qing society, but equally it allowed many more the possibilities of “self-enhancement through cloth and clothing.”⁴⁶ The museum collection does not allow for the definition of regional variations of these consumption practices in material terms. One of the corollaries of Western collecting of Chinese dress was a confounding of regional dress histories: objects were rarely cataloged with any information regarding purchase or production location. Indeed, the processes outlined in the preface mean that information regarding collecting circumstances was often omitted from accession records. Whether purchased in Shanghai, Beijing, or Guangzhou, Chinese dress was simply Chinese dress, and collectors rarely recorded how they acquired their purchases. Accordingly, this book is a study of the Chinese fashion system as a whole rather than the fashion system of Shanghai or Beijing. The focus is the cities of Jiangnan, the area south of the Yangzi River that was China’s wealthiest and most commercialized region, but I also make comparisons and connections to the political center, Beijing, and two other heavily commercialized regions, Guangzhou and Sichuan. This broad approach has its limitations—particularly in providing a material counterpart to the regionality that texts suggest was integral to the fashion system—but it enables investigation of the ways in which fashionable consumption in diverse regions was integrated through interprovincial trade and print culture.

Despite the importance of handicraft to understanding the progression of the Qing economy and the integration of Chinese culture, historians of China have tended to disdain objects as valid historical enquiry. The following assertion from historian David Johnson gives a sense of their presumed limitation: “Values can be embodied in nonverbal symbols, and exemplified in behavior, but to be communicated with any precision, or to be explained, they must find expression in words.”⁴⁷ But by grounding these typically unprovenanced objects within written and visual descriptions and associations, I seek to recover an experience that has been largely written out of the formal textual canon. In bringing together the material archive of dress, textiles, and embroideries, the visual archive of prints, paintings, and pattern books, and the textual archive of local gazetteers, contemporary diaries, advertisements, urban rhymes, and pawnshop texts, I aim to reconstruct something of the vernacular culture of late Qing women. In using an interdisciplinary approach 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.