Beneath the Surface: The Evolution of Underwear and the Construction of Female Identity in Republic of China (1912–1949)

During the Republic of China, Chinese society was undergoing a transitional stage where tradition and modernity intersected. As a cultural and identity-bearing garment, women’s underwear embodied multiple meanings in this process of change. Drawing on the theoretical framework of material culture in fashion studies, this research integrates museum collections, private holdings, archival documents, and newspaper sources from the Republican period. From a corpus of 80 historical photographs and illustrations and 35 surviving underwear artifacts, the study selected representative examples including bellybands, small vests, western-style chemises, and brassieres for close analysis. These materials reveal how the evolution of underwear marked women’s shift from household producers to active consumers in an emerging market economy. Through these transformations, women either actively or passively redefined their relationship with the body and developed new forms of subjectivity. At the same time, the symbolic decoration of underwear and its circulation through media enabled women to gain greater control over their bodies and to diversify their social identities. Moreover, media representations moved underwear from the private to the public sphere, alternately celebrating and satirizing female bodies, and in doing so created a complex cultural context in which modern female identities were negotiated and reconstructed.