This article examines how politicized forms of dress shaped and expressed Chinese identities from the Republican period to the early decades of New China, with particular attention to Shanghai. It asks how and why the qipao and Mao/Sun Yat-sen suits came to embody changing ideas of selfhood, class and modernity across these historical junctures. Using mixed methods, object-based case studies of garments in Beijing and Shanghai museums, close analysis of pictorial magazines, and quantitative data on fashion education and production, the study traces the shift from imperial dress codes to fashion as a site of personal choice and self-selection, but also of political regulation. Drawing on scholarship on othering and ‘multiple Chinas’, it argues that the evolving forms, materials and styling of these garments reveal how wearers negotiated their positioning as modern subjects and helped to constitute a specifically modern Chinese fashion identity.
Lan et al. (Mon,) studied this question.