Rachel Silberstein

Clothing and accessories from nineteenth-century China reveal much about women's participation in the commercialization of textile handicrafts and the flourishing of urban popular culture. Focusing on women's work and fashion, A Fashionable Century presents an array of visually compelling clothing and accessories neglected by traditional histories of Chinese dress, examining these products' potential to illuminate issues of gender and identity. 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, Silberstein sets 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.

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.

Figural motifs have received little attention in Chinese dress and textile history; typically interpreted as generic figures in garden, 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.

Contrary to conventional Western thought, over the last two hundred years of Qing rule, Chinese women’s dress underwent substantial change. Loose layers became more structured, robes and skirts widened in cut, and emphasis shifted from the ground fabric to creating decorative harmonies and dissonance through borders, sleeves, and collars. This paper argues that the growth of professional embroidery (shangpinxiu) was pivotal to these developments.

The flourishing of shangpinxiu over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created complex producer systems spanning urban guilds, commercial workshops, pattern-drafters, intermediary agents, and sub-contracted female embroiderers. Along with official attire, ceremonial props, and theatrical costume, professional workshops centred their output on embroidered accessories like cloud collars or border sets. For the female consumer, the widespread dissemination of these articles created a more attainable forum for fashion; for the male commentator, this trend was viewed as ridiculous and wasteful.

Combining analysis of guild, gazetteer and biji texts with close object study, I suggest that the predominance of embroidered components in late Qing fashions derived from the specialization and modularization that characterized professional embroidery production systems. Further, I seek to explicate the vociferous criticism of this fashion trend in terms of the potential such objects offered women. Accessible to both producer and purchaser, easily added or removed as the wearer wished, sleevebands and border sets often featured designs
inspired by print and performance. In this way, the commercialization of embroidery not only popularized fashion, but also served to connect nineteenth-century women with contemporary trends in popular culture.

West 86th V 26 N 2 Western museum collections of Chinese dress were enabled by Qing dynastic collapse and the ensuing rise of imperialism and tourism. This article reconstructs the process through which Chinese dress objects transferred from wearing to display, and the collectors, curators , and dealers responsible. In revealing the key role of the secondhand clothes dealer and probing collectors' motives and scholars' priorities, it 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 article explores how foreign buyers changed understandings of secondhand Chinese dress, and more fundamentally, what this history tells us about how objects transition between different modalities of worth within the "art-culture system." The fact that rather abruptly, in the space of a few decades, a large class of non-Western artefacts came to be redefined as art is a taxo-nomic shift that requires critical historical discussion, not celebration.. .. [S]uch a focus would treat art as a category defined and redefined in specific historical contexts and relations of power.-James Clifford, Histories of the Tribal and the Modern The demise of the Qing dynasty in China ushered in not just political upheaval but also a new age of touristic collecting. When the Manchu regime fell in 1911, the market was flooded with the possessions of Manchu and Han families forced to liquidate their assets, and these objects-porcelain, robes, jades, paintings, and furniture-continued to be sold through the next two decades.

The uses of imported fabrics in China have not been very well studied. Drawing on primary sources, Silberstein constructs a multidimensional account of the introduction and dissemination of woolens in nineteenth-century China. She brings to light the different categories of wool, how these fabrics were incorporated into objects such as purses and made into rain clothes and ostentatious capes as well. Wool was available in a broad range of hues. Initially, trendsetters such as Manchu elites and courtesans wore wool the most, but the warmth and bright colors of wool made it appealing to the middling social group and even destabilized the hierarchy in the Chinese clothing system. Wool cloths entered China through urban centers, first Canton and Beijing as trade items, luxuries, and diplomatic gifts from foreigners, but after the Treaty of Nanjing opened up other trade ports, Western fabrics spread quickly throughout the country and expanded the Chinese clothing repertoire that had prev...

The lack of extant examples of Chinese embroidery patterns - that most ephemeral of design tools - has meant the pattern’s role in the formation and rise of the commercial embroidery industry has been little investigated.

Beginning in the late Ming (1368-1644) and gathering pace in the mid-late Qing dynasty (1644-1911), embroidery underwent a process of commercialization. As commercial embroidery (shangpin xiu商品繡) flourished, complex producer systems evolved: encompassing urban guilds, commercial workshops, pattern-drafters, intermediary agents, and female embroiderers, to whom the work was often subcontracted around the local countryside of Suzhou, Guangdong, and Chongqing. Embroidered dress and accessories, theatrical costumes and props, household art and furnishings - all could be produced in this way, as products of networks, with different tasks divided and specialized across diverse individuals in a manner similar to printing or porcelain.

What role did the embroidery pattern play in communicating between these players divided by gender and status, as well as place? How far did the pattern provide a means of constituting and disseminating new categories of embroidery, in particular, regionally defined embroidery styles?

In this paper, by reviewing the few known examples of embroidery patterns and introducing some recently discovered embroidery pattern-books in British collections, I discuss how the evolution of the embroidery pattern through the Qing and Republic (1912-49) contributes to our understanding of the commercialization or professionalization of embroidery during this period. In particular I focus on the changing role of the pattern during the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries, a time in which the epistemic culture of embroidery fundamentally shifted, as the industry became increasingly financially vital and its female producers entered public arenas as students and teachers, artists and shop-owners. As different players competed to control and define embroidery skills, knowledge and styles, the pattern became a means of comprising artistic value and local identity, something of great importance to the creation of “The Four Great Regional Embroideries” (Si da ming xiu四大名繡), a grouping of regional embroidery styles that emerged during this juncture. At a time when locality had become a mode of artistic and industrial competition, this paper repositions the humble pattern as an informant on the relationships between diverse historical players in the embroidery industry and a fundamental means of exchanging knowledge in the visual culture of embroidery.

A disinterest in foreign materialities has long been a central component of the Western framing of Chinese clothing as a non-changing entity. Whilst the last two decades of research has gradually dismantled this account, the question of the role of foreign fabrics in Qing dynasty dress culture remains unresolved. This paper explores how woolen fabrics were conceptualized and incorporated into nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Chinese dress, and the role of urban consumption in fashioning a place for these new global textiles. How did a fabric genre that had always skirted the textile mainstream, finally manage to enter? How did a society “soe addicted to silks” finally come to accommodate wool? What garment forms were they considered appropriate for? What Chinese fabrics did foreign woolens displace?  How were their new textures and colors defined, classified and understood? In other words, if we can in fact find a place for foreign materialities on Chinese bodies, what kind of place?

With an emphasis on moving beyond the imperial and institutional spheres that dominate official records, I demonstrate how more vernacular sources ​- specifically late Qing novels and the urban “bamboo-ballad” (zhuzhici) style rhymes​ -​ may be combined with study of extant objects to reconstruct the variety of ways in which woolen fabrics were first utilized in the Chinese dress system. ​C​ontrary to the traditional framework of Chinese textiles and dress, in which innovation and contemporary change are fundamentally problematic, I argue that during the nineteenth-century, certain sectors of society greeted the new imported wool textiles with enthusiasm and creativity. An investigation of the uses of foreign woolens in Chinese society offers an opportunity to understand not only how Chinese men and women were being intricated within the new global networks of the nineteenth century, but further how dress and textiles formed primary means of constituting and negotiating the historical transformations of the late Qing.

A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing is an interdisciplinary study that draws on art history, fashion theory, dress history, anthropology, and cultural studies. This is the first book by Rachel Silberstein, a scholar of Chinese material culture specializing in fashion, gender and textile handicrafts. In order to better convey "the voices and texts of the Qing dynasty or studies by Chinese scholars" (p. xv), she makes extensive use of primary sources with expert translation. This volume is not a chronological survey like Antonia Finnane's Changing Clothes in China (2008) or a handbook of key garment types like Valery Garrett's Chinese Dress: From the Qing Dynasty to the Present Day (2007). Rather, it is a polemical exploration of the relationship between fashion and ethnic identity, the impact of the market economy, regionalism, and women's agency. This book considers instances of transgression where ordinary people dressed up to impersonate high society as integral to fashion trends, imitating "dukes [by] wearing rank badge coats, dragon roundels, and jewel-topped hats" (p. 52) and splurging on ritual costumes which went counter to Confucian frugality. The age-old rules were such that attires had to t "the season, occasion, and most of all, identity" (p. 52). But these rules appeared to be constantly outed in the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), a time of ethnic coexistence , commercial vibrancy, and technical innovation in fashion production. The anonymity of Qing creators such as workshop sta f and pattern makers presents a particular challenge to researchers, one that is compounded by the generic labeling of Chinese dress items in many museums. As Silberstein points out, there was no detailed provenance, no preface, no maker's mark, and no publisher, to verify an item's exact origins (p. 11). There were brand names and regional labels, but unlike today's fashion system which orchestrates coherent trends from season to season, product developments in the Qing dynasty proved more di fused. Silberstein further questions the fashion values expressed in formal texts that exclusively represented the viewpoints of the male literati. For a more comprehensive picture of how styles and wearers were evaluated, she not only examines gazetteers and dynastic histories, but also lesser-known, vernacular sources such as songs and "bamboo ballads" or