Chinese Clothing Defined

Chinese clothing is the clothing, ancient and modern, worn by the Chinese people. It has varied by region and time, and is recorded by the artifacts and arts of Chinese culture.

Dynastic China

Traditional Chinese clothing is broadly referred to as hanfu, with many variations such as traditional Chinese academic dress. Japanese clothes and Chinese clothes are very similar. Depending on one's status in society, each social class had a different sense of fashion. Most Chinese men wore Chinese black cotton shoes, but wealthy higher class people would wear tough black leather shoes for formal occasions. Very rich and wealthy men would wear very bright, beautiful silk shoes sometimes having leather on the inside. Women would wear bright, silk coated Lotus shoes under their bound feet. Male shoes were mostly less elaborate than women's.

Civil and Military Officials

Chinese civil or military officials used a variety of codes to show their rank and position. The most recognized is the Mandarin square or rank badge. Another code was also the use of colorful hat knobs fixed on the top of their hats: the specific hat knob on one's hat determined one's rank, as there were twelve types of hat knobs representing the nine distinctive ranks of the civil or military position. Variations existed for Ming official headwear.

Qing Dynasty (1644–1911)

The rise of the Manchu Qing Dynasty in many ways represented a cultural rupture with the past, as Manchu clothing styles were required to be worn by all noblemen and officials. This style eventually became popular among the commoners. A new style of dress, called tangzhuang, included the changshan worn by men and the qipao worn by women. Manchu official headwear differed from the Ming version, but the Qing continued to use the Mandarin square.

Republican Era

The abolition of imperial China in 1912 had an immediate effect on dress and customs. The largely Han Chinese population immediately cut off their queue, which they had been forced to grow in submission to the overthrown Qing Dynasty. Sun Yat-sen popularised a new style of men's wear, featuring jacket and trousers instead of the robes worn previously. Adapted from Japanese student wear, this style of dress became known as the Zhongshan suit (Zhongshan being one of Sun Yat-sen's given names in Chinese). For women, a transformation of the traditional qipao (cheongsam) resulted in a slender and form fitting dress with a high cut, resulting in the contemporary image of a cheongsam but contrasting sharply with the traditional qipao.

Early People's Republic

Early in the People's Republic, Mao Zedong would inspire Chinese fashion with his own variant of the Zhongshan suit, which would be known to the west as the Mao suit. Meanwhile, Sun Yat-sen's widow, Soong Ching-ling, popularised the cheongsam as the standard female dress. At the same time, old practices such as footbinding, which had been viewed as backwards and unmodern by both the Chinese as well as Westerners, were forbidden. Around the Destruction of the "Four Olds" period in 1964, almost anything seen as part of traditional Chinese culture would lead to problems with the Communist Red Guards; items that attracted dangerous attention if caught in public included jeans, high heels, Western-style coats, ties, jewelry, cheongsams, and long hair, which were regarded as symbols of bourgeois lifestyle.

Clothing in Contemporary China (1980–present)

Chinese fashion has drastically changed over time. Following the relaxation of communist clothing standards in the late 1970s, the way Chinese dressed and the fashion trends of the country were also changing. Contemporary urban clothing seemed to have developed an obsession with brand names. In major urban centres, especially Shanghai, an increased western look is preferred, and there is an emphasis on formal wear over casual wear for adults on the streets. Teenagers prefer brand names and western clothing, and children usually wear clothes decorated with cartoon characters. However, there is also effort to revive traditional clothing forms such as the hanfu by the hanfu movement. At an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shanghai in 2001, the host presented silk-embroidered tangzhuang jackets as the Chinese traditional national costume.

In rural China, clothing tended for longer to remain as it was in the 1960s, because life in rural areas was less influenced by western lifestyle and new western style clothing was less affordable; in less isolated areas, blue jeans, T-shirts and modern jackets are common because many factories manufacture these goods at an affordable price, and non-western modern clothing such as the Mao suit was often hand-made by experienced tailors and grandmothers.

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The definition above is adapted from Wikipedia's article on Chinese clothing; visit Wikipedia for the most current version.