Historian of Textiles and Dress
Dr Rachel Silberstein is a historian of textiles and dress in early modern China, with a broad interest in the ways people produce and consume the fabrics that adorn and define their bodies, and the impact of new technologies and trade upon these practices.
She gained a DPhil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford in 2015, with a dissertation on fashionable dress in nineteenth-century China. This became the subject of her prizewinning 2020 monograph, A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing, published by the University of Washington Press. She has also published articles in journals including Late Imperial China, Fashion Theory, and Dress, and a number of edited volumes.
Writing
Monograph
A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing (University of Washington Press, 2020)
A Fashionable Century uses museum collections of Chinese dress and accessories to explore the relationship between handicraft commercialization and fashion in late Qing China. Through an array of visually compelling clothing and accessories neglected by traditional histories of Chinese dress, it examines issues of gender and identity, including women's participation in textile handicraft production and the flourishing of urban popular culture. In the late Qing, the expansion of production systems and market economies transformed the Chinese fashion system, widening access to fashionable techniques, materials, and imagery. Challenging the conventional production model, in which women embroidered items at home, the book places fashion within a process of commercialization that created networks of urban guilds, commercial workshops, and subcontracted female workers. These networks gave rise to new trends influenced by performance and prints, and they offered women opportunities to participate in fashion and contribute to local economies and cultures.
The book won the Millia Davenport Publication Award 2021, Costume Society of America, was long-listed for the Textile Society of America's R. L. Shep Award, 2022, and received an Honorable Mention from the Bei Shan Tang Award, 2023.
You can learn more about the book here and read reviews of the book:
Journal of the American Oriental Society
Hanxue yanjiu tongxun漢學研究通訊 (Newsletter on Research in International Sinology)
Orientalistische Literaturzeitung
Published Papers
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One of the largest obstacles to studying the clothing of Qing people is the huge gulf between historical experience – what people in the Qing dynasty actually wore, and material survival – what people in the late Qing and early Republic collected. This gulf is especially problematic when it comes to understanding the clothing consumption of ordinary people, because so few artefacts survived. Though most of China’s 400-odd million population of the 19th century would have worn cotton, hemp or ramie, silk dominates museum collections. This issue has also obstructed our understanding of fabric colors and dyes. Museum collections lead us to imagine who got to wear colorful dress in nineteenth-century China as two extremes: at one end, the colorful silks worn by the imperial family, the nobility, and elites and at the other, the millions of ordinary Chinese who wore varieties of indigo-dyed cotton. But the mid-Qing period witnessed a expansion in the dyeing of both cotton and silk, creating the possibility of a middle ground – a group of consumers who were able to purchase cotton in a range of colors. This expansion of cotton dyes and its impact on consumers is an important issue that has the potential to illuminate upon living standards, and how they developed through the course of the Qing dynasty. Given the absence of surviving objects, this paper uses dye and fabric names as alternative approach to reconstructing this material culture history. By comparing the list of cotton dye terms included in The Cloth Classic, a late eighteenth-century, early nineteenth-century cotton merchant’s manual, with other lists of dye colors, and literary representations, I explore the clothing cultures of different consumers, and how the expansion of dyes impacted on ordinary people’s consumption.
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This chapter provides a broad overview of fashion in Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) China, through four key stages of change: the early Ming transition away from the Mongolian influence of the preceding Yuan dynasty; the rise of fashion through the silver century period (1550-1650); the re-introduction of ethnicity as a source of sartorial tension with the ascent of the ethnic Manchu Qing rulers; and the commercialization of fashion in the mid-late Qing period. Each section is structured around a key image: a fifteenth-century handscroll of the Ming court at leisure; a seventeenth-century painting of a Nanjing literati surrounded by three fashionable musicians; an eighteenth-century album of Jiangnan amorous elites; and a late Qing beauty print. Through this visual grounding, the chapter identifies both the stylistic shifts and the systemic features of fashion in Chinese history: the key players (court, literati, courtesans, entertainers); the importance of urban centers as production hubs, and providing the stimulus of popular culture; the impact of developments in the textile industry, in particular the shift away from imperially controlled workshops to private producers that permitted wider access to textile and tailor-made handicrafts; and finally the impetus of global trade in the last decades of the period.
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Brief biography of Zhang Jian (張謇 1853-1926) – Cotton industrialist and Philanthropist
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This study introduces the rare late Ming embroidery pattern-book, Collection of Snipped Rosy Clouds (Jian xia ji 剪霞集). Placing the album’s wide range of imagery in the context of the expansion of woodblock printed design and the growing commercial value of embroidery, the paper reveals the interactions between embroidery and other late Ming handicraft design, and the opportunities the pattern book offered embroiderers to apply literary value to their embroidered work.
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Western museum collections of Chinese dress were framed by a specific historical context of Qing dynastic collapse, and the ensuing rise of imperialism and tourism. This paper reconstructs the process through which Chinese dress objects transferred from wear to display, and the collectors, curators, and dealers responsible. In revealing the key role of the second-hand clothes dealer and probing collectors’ motives and scholars’ priorities, the paper seeks to take a fresh look at the process of creating meaning in the museum collection. Through a close analysis of pawnshop texts, it reconstructs the parameters of materiality, workmanship, and geography through which dealers assessed garments, and compares this with the collector’s connoisseurship framework. Thus, the paper explores how foreign buyers changed understandings of second-hand Chinese dress, and more fundamentally, what this history tells us about how objects transition different modalities of worth within the “Art-Culture System”.
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There have been few studies of the reception given to foreign, imported fabrics in China. Drawing on primary sources, including novels and bamboo ballads, Rachel Silberstein constructs a multi-dimensional account of the introduction and dissemination of woolens in nineteenth-century China. She analyzes the different categories of wool which were traded during this period, and how these fabrics were incorporated into objects like purses and hangings and made into rain clothes and outer jackets. Wool was available, in China as in Japan, in a broad range of hues: red, black, yellow, blue, green, and purple. Initially, it was trendsetters like Manchu elites and courtesans who wore wool the most, but the warmth and bright colors that this fabric afforded made it appealing to the middling social group, something that challenged existing social hierarchies. For example, merchants and servants, who had previously been prohibited from wearing sky-blue, suddenly donned widely available woolens in this color. Woolen cloths entered China through urban centers, first Canton, Beijing and Suzhou as trade items and diplomatic gifts from foreigners. After the Treaty of Nanjing opened up other trade ports, Western fabrics, including wool, spread quickly throughout the country and expanded the Chinese clothing repertoire—for both men and women—that had previously been confined to silk and plant fabrics. It should not be assumed, as Silberstein points out, that woolens were received with reservation because of their foreign origins; in some cases, they were worn boldly as fashion statements that included embroidered embellishments.
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This paper explores how the growth of commercialized textile production entwined with fashionable consumption to stimulate new styles in Chinese women’s dress during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Focusing on the development of Suzhou’s embroidery industry, I discuss how production systems delineated the possibilities of fashionable dress and demonstrate the shift towards the embroidered accessory during this period. Combining analysis of embroidered objects with vernacular and commercial texts detailing the growth of this industry, I consider the impact of commercialization not only upon styles of dress, but also the ways in which women engaged with fashion, showing how the fashionable accessory allowed women, as both producers and consumers of fashion, to connect to contemporary cultural trends.
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Figural motifs have received little attention in Chinese dress and textile history; typically interpreted as generic ‘figures in gardens’, they have long been overshadowed by auspicious symbols. Yet embroiderers, like other craftsmen and women in Qing dynasty China (1644-1911), sought inspiration from the vast array of narratives that circulated in print and performance. This paper explores the trend for the figural through the close study of two embroidered jackets from the Royal Ontario Museum collection featuring dramatic scenery embroidered upon ‘narrative roundels’ and ‘narrative borders’. I argue that three primary factors explain the appearance and popularity of narrative imagery in mid-late Qing dress and textiles: the importance of theatrical performance and narratives in nineteenth-century life; the dissemination of narrative imagery in printed anthologies and popular prints; and the commercialization of embroidery. By placing the fashion for these jackets firmly within the socio-economic context of nineteenth-century China, the paper provides a novel way of understanding the phenomena of narrative figures on women’s dress through the close relationship between popular culture and fashion in nineteenth-century Chinese women’s dress.
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This article examines a late Qing woman’s jacket embroidered with eight well-known Suzhou garden and temple sites. Such an object makes little sense within the conventional historiography of Chinese dress, long dominated by regulated garments like dragon robes and rank badges, and consequently, concerned with themes of imperial status and official rank. I argue that the jacket is best understood, instead, at the juncture of three wider historical processes: the popularisation of tourism, the commercialisation of embroidery, and the role of urban courtesans in nineteenth-century Suzhou. Combining close analysis of material culture with a wide range of textual sources, in particular folkloric records and urban “bamboo ballads”, the article demonstrates the impact of handicraft commercialization and widening material consumption upon late Qing women’s fashions, and explores the degree to which these developments enabled women to connect with and contribute to popular urban culture. The jacket thus highlights not only the economic salience of commercialized handicrafts, but also the growing visibility of women in the early modern Chinese cityscape.
In Progress
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This chapter surveys the scope and significance of textiles in China’s foreign trade. An array of raw materials and manufactured fabrics were imported into and exported from China, including Chinese raw silk and woven silks; Indian raw cotton and Chinese cotton fabrics; European woolen fabrics; and furs from Russia and the northwest of America. By exploring the different types of fibers and fabrics, and their production centers; trading techniques, including both sale and trucking, and distribution; as well as pricing, consumption, and demand; the chapter investigates the importance of the textile trade and the degree to which this trade intricated China within both new and existing regional and global trade networks.
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Economic historians have asserted that Jiangnan cotton fabrics improved in quality through the Qing period, allowing those producers who focused upon styles, colors, and fashion to earn better profits and leading to numerous different options – the “seventy-two kinds”. But what techniques were used to create those styles, colors, and fashions, and to what extent did the finishing sector of the cotton industry – the dyers and the calenderers - rather than the weavers, enable this purported expansion of styles and increase in profits? The notion that coloring and finishing options expanded for the ordinary people who wore cotton cloth is an intriguing proposition in relation to several historical debates, including comparative living standards, commercialization of the cotton industry, and the history of Asian dye technologies. However, though the vast majority of Qing Chinese would have worn cotton or ramie, these claims cannot be substantiated through material culture history: the biases of collecting and material survival mean that extant cotton garments are rare and studies of Qing dress are dominated by silk. Accordingly, The Cloth Classic (布经), an late eighteenth-century compendium of advice and experience written by a cloth merchant for cloth merchants, possesses considerable value for understanding the causes and impact of advances in cotton finishing. It contains a long and detailed section on cloth dyeing, including 68 recipes for different colors, a surprisingly large number given the assumption that societies with indigenous cotton production like China could only dye indigo blue or tannin brown due to the difficulties of dyeing cellulosic cottons, unlike proteinaceous silks and woolens. This paper analyzes the dyeing and calendering content of The Cloth Classic within the context of developments in the Qing period Jiangnan cotton industry. By evaluating four factors that potentially drove the expansion of the finishing sector: technical innovations, dyestuff trade, commercial organization, and consumer demand, I use this commercial text to redress the unrepresentative material archive, to verify the existence of the “seventy-two kinds,” and to provide insights into the economic and cultural significance of the Jiangnan dyeing and calendering workshops.
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In July 1938, the International Red Cross (IRC) organized an exhibition to publicize the handicraft programmes they organized in the refugee camps of Japan-occupied Shanghai. Needlework was prominently displayed: long a traditional textile craft, it was also amongst China’s most vital export industries. But the needlework shown was not the silk embroidery or cotton cross-stitch practiced by Chinese women for centuries, but rather Western forms—drawnwork, cutwork, and needlework lace—introduced by foreign missionaries just decades earlier. When the profitability of these foreign styles had become evident, merchants supplanted the missionaries and established large-scale industries in Shantou, Yantai, and Pudong. Recast as national products, the Chinese lace industry employed hundreds of thousands of women and girls in the interwar years (1919-37) and competed with the European lace they mimicked. This burgeoning lace industry had been shattered by the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), so the IRC’s craft programme would aid both refugees and local exporters, an inherent tension that would engender controversy. Using the IRC records and contemporary newspaper accounts, this paper investigates the different constituents served by the IRC’s needlework project and how its conceptualization of handicraft was shaped by this recent history of charitable endeavor turned global commerce.
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Historians have long dismissed the EIC’s failure to turn their trade in woolens to China during the Canton system era (ca.1760-1834) to profit or volume, yet the posited causes are neither sufficient nor robust, and understanding of the reception of foreign goods in pre-Opium War China has moved little beyond the “Chinese indifference” model. Combining EIC archives with new compilations of Qing commercial sources, the project considers British motives and strategies alongside analysis of Chinese textile markets and consumption to form a novel approach that challenges the assumption of Qing consumers’ disinterest, reveals a faulty logic at the heart of the Opium Wars rationale, and illuminates upon the eighteenth-century divergence of British and Chinese textile industries. At the intersection of material culture studies and socio-economic history, the book makes key contributions to histories of the Canton trade, Qing textile consumption, British textile trade, and global living standard comparisons.
Teaching
Rachel has taught classes on a wide range of topics in visual and material culture at institutions including the Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Washington, and the University of Puget Sound.
She has also guest lectured at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Yale University, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago.
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University of Puget Sound, Fall 2020
University of Puget Sound, Spring 2021
University of Florida, Spring 2023
This course surveys the history of art across Asia, from the Indus Valley civilization and the earliest bronzes of Shang dynasty China through to the floating world prints of Edo period Japan and modern photography in Calcutta. We will explore the major currents and trends of Asian art history, with a focus on how different artistic styles have emerged from intellectual and religious beliefs, geographical locations, trade systems, and other historical contexts including colonialism and globalization. Class and readings provide a contextual framework for understanding the material and provide a deeper examination of key themes in Asian visual and material culture, including paintings, architecture, sculptures, textiles and porcelain. Class discussions and assignments are intended to develop the skills of close looking, critical thinking and talking/writing about the visual and material arts.
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University of Washington, Spring 2018
Rhode Island School of Design, Spring 2016
Providence College, Fall 2014
This course provides an introduction to the study of visual arts in Chinese history. It will introduce the major developments and themes of Chinese visual culture, interpreted broadly to include bronzes, jades, painting, calligraphy, sculpture, textiles, printing, and ceramics. The lectures will follow a chronological and thematic course through the development of visual culture in China. We will consider how to position these objects within a historical and cultural context, with particular attention to the interactions between visual arts and gender, religion, politics, and ethnic identity. By means of formal analysis and reconstructing production processes and consumption contexts, we will learn how to describe, research, and discuss objects of Chinese visual arts. We will also explore the recirculation of these objects - both in China and abroad - and consider how far theories and methodologies of Western art history can be productively applied to Chinese visual culture.
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University of Washington, Winter 2019, Winter 2018
This course surveys the civilizations of Asia from the Neolithic through to the 16th century, with a focus on China, Korea, Japan, and India. It does so through the lens of major historical sites: the Great Stupa at Sanchi, the First Emperor’s Tomb, Seokguram caves, Angkor Wat, and many others. These sites have left us with a vast array of textual, material and visual evidence that allow us to explore key historical moments, and the environmental, intellectual and cultural trends that formed Asian civilization. As we learn how to “read” these different texts with a historical and critical perspective, we will explore broad themes of religion, philosophy and politics. We will also consider connections and interactions between these different regions, and how each developed independent and distinct cultures whilst still participating in an “Asian civilization”. Lastly, we explore the afterlife of these sites, objects and texts in contemporary Asia and in the Western encyclopedic museum, and how this usage influences understanding of Asian civilization in the world today. This course does not assume prior knowledge of the languages and cultures of Asia - it is intended to provide a foundation for further study.
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Rhode Island School of Design, Spring 2016
This lecture course uses the 2013-14 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500-1800 as a starting point to examine the role of Asian textiles and dress in the globalized markets of the early modern era. Using paradigms of global history and methodologies of material culture, we will explore how channels of trade, migration, and diplomacy enabled cottons and silks from India, China, and Japan to travel around the world and capture the imaginations of distant markets. What role did textiles like Indian chintzes or Chinese trade silks play in changing the consumption patterns and behaviors of Western European and North American society? How was the production and design of objects like the Kashmir shawl or the Manila shawl themselves transformed by transfer to new locales and societies through import and imitation? In order to understand the processes by which traditional designs and constructions were adapted for far-off markets and consumers, students will engage in close study of artifacts from the RISD museum collection of trade textiles. Assignments will allow students to develop skills in writing museum exhibition labels and catalogue entries that explore the design and development of these fascinating textiles.
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Rhode Island School of Design, Spring 2016
This course examines the aesthetic systems, historical development, and cultural meanings of dress and fashion in East Asia. With an emphasis on China, Japan, and Korea during the early modern and modern eras, we will consider the uses of dress within social, cultural, economic, and political systems, and the ways in which the materiality, style and silhouettes of dress have been deployed to express, control and contend gender, class, ethnicity, nationality, and modernity. Using a broad range of sources including paintings, prints and photography, fiction and diaries, songs and movies, we will explore how art historians and cultural historians utilize these different forms of visual, textual, and material representations to reconstruct meaning. Topics include fashion systems, hair-styles, foot-binding and breast-binding, technologies of dress; the reinterpretation of “traditional” dress forms like the qipao, hanbok, kimono in different social and temporal contexts; the way in which East Asian dress has been understood and framed by those outside East Asian society - as collectors and connoisseurs of “ethnic dress” or “art”, and later on in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as consumers of global fashions. Finally we will examine the position of East Asian fashion designers today and their complex relationships with the hegemony of Western fashion systems.
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University of Puget Sound, Spring 2021
University of Washington, Spring 2020, Spring 2019, Spring 2018
This course explores the emergence and development of fashion in the early modern and modern world. How have ideals of the male and female body evolved through history and how do these fashioned bodies inform upon concepts of gender? How did phenomena like fashion magazines, catwalk shows, brand-name logos, global supply chains, and celebrity endorsements develop, and what role did they play in fashioning gendered bodies? In what ways were fashionable consumers of eighteenth-century Edo and London, Paris and Suzhou alike, and in what ways did they differ? Students will be introduced to the key fashion theories and methodologies from art history, gender studies, cultural history, and anthropology. Using this interdisciplinary approach, we will study the relationship between fashion, gender and identity; as well as historical processes of urbanization, industrialization, modernity, and globalization. Class will be taught through a combination of short lectures, class discussions of primary images and texts, film watching and discussions, and student presentations.
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University of Puget Sound, Fall 2021
University of Puget Sound, Spring 2022
This class introduces students to the major artworks, artists and movements of Western Europe and the Americas from circa 1300 to the present. Students will learn to discuss how art communicates meaning, and explore how historical, social, cultural, and artistic contexts shape art. We will examine the multiple global cultural artistic traditions that inform artwork created in the western hemisphere and how to identify the stylistic characteristics of different movements. As well as learning to recognize seminal works of Western art, students will consider how a study of visual art adds to our understanding of past cultures and societies: how art reflects and contributes to political, philosophical and spiritual issues through history. While painting, architecture, and sculpture – the traditional categories of art (which we critique) – will form the basis of works you will memorize and discuss, we will also look at a wider range of artistic production, including prints, drawings, books, textiles, ceramics, photography, and installations. Class activities and assignments of discussion and writing activities will enable students to practice the interpretive methods of art history. Students will hone visual and descriptive skills as they enhance their recognition of schools and styles, and their understanding of the evolution of the western tradition.
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University of Puget Sound, Fall 2020
University of Puget Sound, Spring 2022
Berkeley Xtension School, Spring 2023, Fall 2023
This class explores artistic trends and movements from 1900 to the present, with a focus on the relationship of artists and movements to the historical events that shaped the period. Key questions include: What factors motivated the shift in the visuality of art around 1900? How did social and political events direct the course of art in the early twentieth century? How have artists approached issues of social justice, in particular the inclusion of marginalized groups? How does contemporary art build upon, and depart from, its historical precedents? Primary and theoretical readings will allow students to examine works of art, including painting, architecture, sculpture, photography, installation, and performance art, within their cultural and historical contexts. The course is organized chronologically and thematically, and will include short lectures, whole class and small group discussions, student presentations and writing exercises.
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Rhode Island School of Design, Spring 2016
This course introduces and explores some of the main methodologies employed by art historians to understand works of art, including Connoisseurship, Formalism, Iconography/Iconology, Marxism, Social History, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Semiotics, Post-colonialism/Orientalism, and Visual / Material Culture. Rather than the history of art, we will investigate the history of the history of art: the questions and debates that have shaped the field, the theories and methods through which that history has evolved, and the major figures who created those tools. The course will be taught through lecture, critical reading and discussion. There will also be a class emphasis on developing art historical research and writing skills through short assignments, presentations and peer critiques. The course will culminate in each student’s preparation of a final research paper on an artist, artwork, or artistic movement of their choice that is based on a method (or combination of methods) we have discussed in class, and developed through consultation with the instructor and feedback from other students.
Museum Consulting
Rachel has served as a consultant on Chinese dress and textile collections of museums including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, the Museum of History and Industry, and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.
She offers expert knowledge and research in Chinese textiles and dress for the production of collection assessment, interpretive work, and writing of exhibition and website content, gallery guides, catalogues and other publications.
Contact
For all enquiries, please use this form to get in touch: