A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing.

• Author: Lingley, Kate A.

A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing. By RACHEL SILBERSTEIN. Seattle: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS, 2020. Pp. xvii + 276. S65.

This book is one of a recent and welcome proliferation of art-historical works on dress and textile arts in China. Ironically, given China's fame in world history as the origin of silk, art history as a discipline in the twentieth century tended to pay scant attention to its history of textiles and dress, This neglect had several sources. First, dress and textiles could be dismissed as "minor arts" or craft practices, worth studying only as a window into regional techniques and advances in loom technology. Second, fashion itself, which often reflects women's tastes, could be seen as trivial and ephemeral. And finally, Chinese dress before the twentieth century was widely understood as static, unchanging, and dictated by rigid codes of symbolism and sumptuary regulations, by contrast with the "fashion systems" identified by sociologists of Europe such as Roland Barthes. The careful reader will notice that the last two reasons are in fact contradictory. It is this and other such contradictions in our understanding of Chinese dress and textiles of the nineteenth century that form the genesis for Rachel Silberstein's work.

The author begins from the observation that museum collections of Chinese historical dress are dominated by imperial court robes and rank badges, and that these have been collected and displayed according to a discourse that sees them as highly encoded symbolic objects indicating the wearer's rank and surrounding him or her with appropriately auspicious emblems. Yet even women at the mid-Qing imperial court, as she shows, wore garments that reflected the influence of Suzhou textile design in a way totally at odds with the sumptuary regulations that were supposed to distinguish Manchu ladies from the Han. Something more is going on here, and this is the target of her investigation.

The book is divided into two main parts: the first is dedicated to documenting the ways in which fashion was produced and transmitted during the nineteenth century, often through ways quite unconnected with the court and its concerns. Despite moral discourses of simplicity in dress, the elaborate dress of courtesans in the Southern coastal cities increasingly influenced fashion and taste. In a steadily industrializing China, dynamic relationships developed between commercial and home...