A fashionable century : textile artistry and commerce in the late Qing / Rachel Silberstein.

"A William Sangki and Nanhee Min Hahn book" -- Title page.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preface: In the museum -- Terms, abbreviations, and chronology -- Introduction: Fashion and Chinese history -- PART ONE. CREATING FASHION THROUGH THE DYNASTY: IMAGERY, DISCOURSE, PRODUCTION. 1. Visualizing fashion: ethnicity, place, and transmission -- 2. “Outlandish costume and strange hats”: moral discourses of fashion -- 3. Workshop, boudoir, village: producing embroidered dress-- PART TWO. PLAYS AND POEMS: FASHIONING NINETEENTH-CENTURY DECORATION. 4. Performance, print, and pattern: popular culture in fashion -- 5. “The Luxury of words”: fashion authorities and aspirations -- Conclusion -- Acknowledgments -- Appendix1. A complete record of one hundred blessings and one thousand fortunes: a dowry list for Yu Qingceng, a Zhejiang gentlewoman in the late Qing -- Appendix 2. Clothing, textile, and accessory shop names in mid-Qing Suzhou -- Appendix 3. Commercial embroidery price list from the end of the Qing dynasty -- Appendix 4. Qing dynasty commercial clothing, accessory, and embroidery guilds -- Glossary -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

"Clothing and accessories from nineteenth-century China reveal much about women's participation-as both consumers and producers-in the commercialization of textile handicrafts and the flourishing of urban popular culture in the late Qing dynasty (1644-1911). The potential of clothing and textiles to illuminate issues of gender and identity is examined in this interdisciplinary foray into cultural history and material culture, which draws on vernacular and commercial sources to explain these objects, rather than on the official and imperial texts that have prevailed in studies of Chinese dress history. As production systems and market economies created the modern phenomenon of fashion, commercialized handicrafts transformed the early modern Chinese fashion system. Challenging the conventional production model, in which isolated Chinese women embroidered items by themselves, Rachel Silberstein positions objects of fashionable dress within mid-Qing networks of urban guilds, operated commercial workshops, and subcontracted female workers. These networks gave Chinese women opportunities to participate in fashion in new, connected, and contemporary ways. The formation of a commercialized dress and handicraft industry was thus stimulated by female-oriented domestic fashionable consumption as well as by foreign markets"-- Provided by publisher.

Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on October 08, 2020).

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