Chinese Clothes for Chinese Women: Fashioning the qipao in 1930s China

Abstract

From a background of political chaos, the qipao, a sleek sheath with a stand-up collar, rose in an effort to survive and negotiate with uneven power and desire. Following its emergence in mid-1920s China, the qipao gained immediate currency as standard wear for Chinese women until the early 1940s. Despite numerous regulations on dress and women’s bodily appearance in the Republican Era (1911–1949), the qipao has been constantly revamped through new styles and cuts. Despite its national status in late 1920s in China, its most feminine form in the 1930s was as a fashionable dress favoured by Chinese women of the emerging middle class in modernising and booming cities. At a time when nationalism conflicted with the influx of imported goods and Western-style garments, wearing Chinese clothes like the qipao was often seen as cultural resistance to Westernisation. However, the widespread adaptation of the qipao in the 1930s cannot be reduced to a result of nationalism. Rather, its adaptation suggests Chinese women’s resistance to the Nationalist agenda for their bodies and appearance. Fashioning the qipao became a silent tool for Chinese women to struggle against state regulation of their bodies. Through changes in style and responses to Western fashion trends, Chinese women tactically intervened, using the qipao to rebel against the nation’s authority, challenging the dominant Western aesthetic standards. The social practice involved in wearing and developing the qipao manifested a set of aesthetic judgments that was unique to Chinese clothes at that time. This chapter examines how the qipao was worn in negotiation with institutional repression through the study of Linglong, a popular women’s magazine in 1930s China. Chinese women’s attitudes towards Western-style fashion and aesthetic judgment, mediated through resistance and negotiation, will be analysed alongside the creation of new aesthetic standards of Chinese clothes for Chinese women of that time.

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