In the year 2020, a pandemic traceable to a virus-rich species of horseshoe bat brought fashion weeks around the world to a halt. China was ground zero. With Hubei province in lockdown from late January and international borders soon closed to flights from anywhere in the country, few Chinese designers were able to attend the autumn/winter fashion weeks of February 2020. In Milan, hub of a Chinese regional cluster specializing in fashion, the Italian Fashion Chamber launched a ‘China we are with you’ campaign and compensated for the absence of Chinese designers with a virtual display of their works. In Paris a week later, the only show from China was a gallery display by Uma Wang. Facemasks were the accessory of the day. Soon fashion workshops all over the world would be churning them out.

Introduces the mains themes; discusses key terms such as fashion, Mao suit, and zhifu; surveys the state of the field in order to locate the book in a wider scholarly conversation, and describes the organization of the book.

The Mao years were also the time of the pattern book, a characteristic genre of publishing in the Mao years. Pattern books were core to the dissemination of skills needed for the making of the clothing worn in the New China ushered into being by the Communist Party. Privately published, crudely illustrated publications produced largely for sewing schools in the early 1950s gradually gave way later in the decade to increasingly standardized works written by research groups or, later, revolutionary committees, produced in ever greater print runs in cities across China. They made available a view of contemporary clothing in which the foreground was occupied by the Zhongshan suit.

Some clothing styles are commonly associated with women. The Lenin jacket (Lieningzhuang), the dual-purpose jacket (liangyongshan) and the Chinese-style jacket (Zhongzhuang or bianfu) are examples. As Chapter 9 shows, attributing gender to particular styles is nearly always complicated. The names of all of these styles were also attached to garments for men. These were garments that were distinct from zhifu. What they looked like, who wore them, and in what circumstances, are questions that throw light both on the garments themselves and on the zhifu with which they coexisted. Similar questions can be asked of the category of ‘strange clothes and outlandish dress’. An established four-character phrase, ‘strange clothes and outlandish dress’, was a discourse that helped keep the zhifu regime intact for some years after the death of Mao. Under this regime, the question of what Chinese women should wear never had a very clear answer.

The chronic inefficiencies of clothing production in the Mao years can be attributed in some part to cotton rationing. Chapter 5 explores the impact of rationing on selling, buying and using cloth. Shortages of cotton cloth were virtually guaranteed through a combination of problems in the agrarian sector and priority given to exports in the trade sector. Fabric shortages led to a seemingly interminable cycle of patching and recycling clothes. ‘Supply failing to meet demand’ (gong bu ying qiu) and ‘[getting] clothes made is difficult’ (zuo yi nan) were consistent refrains. While there were some creative responses to shortages, rationing also meant that clothes had to be worn for years on end. Introduced just as the zhifu regime was taking shape, ration coupons were instrumental in consolidating it.

Chapter 3 surveys the range of zhifu (‘uniforms’) made and worn in the Mao years, showing that they quickly replaced the long gown as dress for men in urban contexts.Countering claims that there were no official laws or regulations governing dress in China, this chapter argues that protocols governing work dress constituted a regulatory system. The reorganization of the workforce provided an administrative framework within which making and wearing of zhifu was both encouraged and expected. Once major institutions in education, communications and industry were taken over by the new state, it was to be expected that dress for staff would show similarities across the spectrum of workplaces. Once planning prioritized the production of zhifu, its domination of the clothing supply was assured.

Chapter 2 lays the ground for an understanding of what was involved in the transformation of tailoring, identifying key developments in technology, tools and materials. Pre-industrial sewing techniques and tools show much shared terrain between China and Europe. Items such as scissors, needles and measuring rules were essentially similar. Under the impact of cultural and technological change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even these tools were gradually displaced and a range of entirely new items entered the realm of tailoring. Buttons, safety pins, belt hooks and tape measures flowed into the Treaty Ports from suppliers in Germany, Britain and Japan, stimulating new local industries in China. The changed contents of a sewing basket point in the first half of the twentieth century to a large-scale reconfiguration of clothing production under way in these years, ahead of the visible transformation of dress in the Mao years.

Although zhifu is a term more closely associated with men’s wear than with women’s, women’s work in the Mao years did include making zhifu. Chapter Four documents the proliferation of sewing schools for women in the 1950s, showing that they were a route by which women entered the paid workforce. Women in various contexts – in factories, sewing co-ops, and especially in their homes – were significant agents in the production of the new national wardrobe. In much of rural China, women continued to spin the yarn, weave the cloth, and make the clothes and shoes for all the family members. In this way, they reproduced a material culture not too different from that of preceding generations (although not entirely the same, either). In the towns, however, a new material culture was created, much of it at the hands of women.

Chapter 6 makes a case for periodizing the Mao years as the time of the sewing machine and homemade clothing. Before 1949 most sewing machines were imported. After 1949 a sewing-machine industry developed rapidly and within the space of fifteen years there were factories in practically every province. In propaganda, the sewing machine is overshadowed by the gun, the hammer and the sickle. There were no public awards for the heroic task of working the whole night through to clothe the family. It was possible for a woman to be employed in a clothing factory in the day and then to be fully occupied making clothes at night. Personal memoirs and biographical accounts suggest efforts on an extraordinary scale by individual women in providing clothes for family members and neighbours. They made for love, for necessity, for social advantage and for money. For people who grew up in those decades, the sound of the sewing machine is a clear childhood memory, inextricably linked with memories of the clothes their mothers made them.