:Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation

This book makes important contributions to scholarship in the areas of both history and fashion. It convincingly challenges the misplaced view that China “had no fashion” until it imported the phenomenon from Europe in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Through its generously and beautifully illustrated pages, the book traces the history of fashion in China from the late Ming through the twenty-first century. The story of China's transformation in fashion from changpao (long robes) and embroidered cloth shoes to jeans, t-shirts, and running shoes is more than a simple change in consumer taste; political, moral, and national ideals are reflected in each shift in clothing culture. Antonia Finnane explores the core tenets perceived to underpin the emergence of “fashion” globally—urbanization, industrialization, and consumption—and shows the ways in which these phenomena also produced fashion in China. But she also demonstrates that there were additional factors influencing the Chinese case, and in this respect she makes a valuable contribution to reshaping the core principles of fashion theory. For example, the importance of textile production in China's pre-industrial economy and the high cultural value placed on innovative textile design requires fashion theorists to consider the limits of industrialization and urbanization as useful markers of fashion. Finnane has shown us that political design plays an important part in clothing design and that ideological identities impact dramatically on clothing identities. This underscores her point that fashion is not merely a product of urbanization, industrialization, and consumer culture. Finnane also argues that the mobility of fashion is more than the transfer of styles from West to East; Chinese clothing has energized European styles for centuries and continues to do so today.