Читать книгу A Fashionable Century - Rachel Silberstein - Страница 6

If all the clothing handed down for generations had never been sold to dealers in secondhand goods, their annual sunning in June would have been 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 would 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.

Zhang Ailing, “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes” (Geng yi ji), 1943

The chief problem presented by the sheer phenomenon of aesthetic force, in whatever form and in result of whatever skill it may come, is how to place it within the other modes of social activity, how to incorporate it into the texture of a particular pattern of life.

Clifford Geertz, “Art as a Cultural System,” 1976

The luxuries of the people are also the livelihoods of the people.

Gu Gongxie, “Excerpts from Leisurely Writings to Pass the Summer”

(Xiaoxia xianji zhaichao), 1785