Pod Insights Articles of Interest The Princesses of China About this episode China is the land of the future. So why is everyone dressing like 16th century princesses?
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 I have to warn you upfront, my Chinese pronunciation is terrible. Ni chou ying guan, right? How do you say "speak"? I'm trying over here. Is it ni chou? Yeah, can you ask? I promised myself that I would not make a story about China. When I was invited at the last minute to attend a conference in Beijing, I was like, "I'm just gonna let it wash over me. I am not gonna work, I'm not gonna make a story about it." But then, I couldn't avoid it. All right, maybe I will ask some of them where they got their clothes from. Because at all the major tourist sites, there were crowds of people, mostly women, dressing like 15th-century Chinese royalty. I mean, huge, massive crowds of them, traffic jams of them,
0:42 Speaker 00 wearing long, fur-trimmed robes with long bell sleeves and elaborate vertical updos festooned with golden hair sticks, fans, makeup, teetering on heels. To the clueless American, they kind of looked like iterations of Queen Amidala. They looked incredible. May I ask, where did you get your costume?
1:01 Speaker 01 Here's no.
1:02 Speaker 00 They're not yours?
1:03 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:04 Speaker 00 You rent?
1:04 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:05 Speaker 00 Ah.
1:06 Speaker 01 We all rent.
1:07 Speaker 00 Oh, everybody rents?
1:08 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:08 Speaker 00 From different places?
1:09 Speaker 01 Yes, yes.
1:10 Speaker 00 Okay, so they were renting these elaborate getups so they could post pictures on Red Note? You look amazing! I get it, that's something people would do. That didn't seem like something I needed to make a story about. But then I just couldn't stay away. Something about it felt like more than just cosplay.
1:26 Speaker 02 Oh, okay. So I just asked, like, why you want to be here wearing this?
1:30 Speaker 00 My friend, podcaster and producer, Yabu Ji, played translator and helped me approach some of these princesses in a less embarrassing way.
1:37 Speaker 02 They said, because they are from the southern area, that's why they want to have a taste of it, while they are visiting the Forbidden City.
1:43 Speaker 00 Yabu and I were in the Forbidden City, which is the name of the sprawling imperial palace in the middle of Beijing. It was the home of the last royal dynasties, and it's a museum today. And its bright pagodas and high walls do make great photo backgrounds. But most importantly for these princesses, it's also the setting of a wildly popular TV series. Wait, what's the name of the drama?
2:06 Speaker 02 They have, like, official translation of the name, but the Chinese is Zheng Huan Zhan.
2:10 Speaker 00 It's translated officially as "Empresses in the Palace." It aired in 2012, and Yabu described the plot as "women scheming for power and the emperor's attention by killing each other's babies."
2:24 Speaker 00 So Yabu. Okay.
2:26 Speaker 02 And also I asked, like, is any of the inspiration from the drama? Then said absolutely yes.
2:31 Speaker 00 Okay, people dress like their favorite TV shows, take pictures of themselves and put them on red note. Makes sense. Can I like, ask you what you think is up with it? Yeah, what's your opinion?
2:40 Speaker 02 Well, I'm, I'm, I did my fellowship in cynicism, so I don't really have any positive opinion towards it.
2:48 Speaker 00 Yabu is such a hater.
2:49 Speaker 02 I can see a lot of very young kids are dressing like that here in this very historical site. It means something to them to have a dream for a day. I support them, you know, if they want to have a dream, go have a dream. I think one thing about China is because we know that modern days is very complicated. It's a lot of policy related and people are a little afraid to talk about modern scenarios. But if it's history, you feel you are more free in history.
3:19 Speaker 00 I did notice flipping through channels in my hotel room. It's like a period drama. This is also a period piece. World War II drama. That nearly all of the soap operas and movies and scripted TV were historical dramas. This looks like People's Army era. This is like a comedy that's a period drama. Everyone's in robes and... This is another war period drama. Oh, here's people fighting with nunchucks, period movie. This rules. China is the land of the future, where all the cars are electric and park themselves, where you pay for everything with your phone, where the high-speed rail seamlessly transported me 818 miles in four and a half hours and where I was given a professional manicure while I waited to get into a hot pot restaurant. And yet, when it comes to fashion, China is decidedly nostalgic.
4:02 Speaker 00 Not for the People's Army or for World War II. This retro fashion is decidedly older. Does this have any impact on the way they dress normally? Like, do they, yeah?
4:14 Speaker 00 And it extends into far more than just cosplay at tourist attractions.
4:19 Speaker 02 She will wear that for a daily lifestyle, daily occasion.
4:23 Speaker 00 The princesses of China are impacting fashion and summoning a new era in Chinese style, which, I think, is going to impact all of us. After the break.
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7:50 Speaker 00 Oh, here's one of the shops where they rent the clothes. If you would like to dress up as a Chinese princess for a day, it'll only cost you like $20, and that includes hair and makeup. Can you just ask, when was this business established?
8:02 Speaker 02 Okay. 这您家店是什么时候开的?
8:04 Speaker 00 This is a relatively new phenomenon.
8:07 Speaker 02 Just a year.
8:08 Speaker 00 Oh, wow. Yabu asked the proprietor of this store some questions for me.
8:11 Speaker 02 I just asked her like which dynasty the young girls are preferred, and she said it's Ming that they are preferring.
8:17 Speaker 00 The most popular style of costume was from the Ming Dynasty, the penultimate dynasty of China. It had a pretty great 276-year run from 1368 to 1644. This was the dynasty that built the castle of the Forbidden City. It repaired the Great Wall. It made some pretty great vases, a lot of stereotypical Chinese landmarks.
8:38 Speaker 02 The Ming Dynasty's costume are arguably, people think they are more pretty. They are prettier.
8:44 Speaker 00 But I don't think it's just because it's prettier.
8:48 Speaker 02 And Ming is controlled by the Han.
8:49 Speaker 00 Han is the largest ethnic group in China. Over 90% of people in China are Han. Most of these princess clothes are Han. And that's why this clothing is widely known as Hanfu, which is essentially Han clothing, the clothing of the Han people. And honestly, it rips. Yeah, yeah, yeah, big wide sleeves.
9:09 Speaker 02 The sleeves are wide, too.
9:10 Speaker 00 Yeah.
9:11 Speaker 02 Because, I mean, royals, they don't need to do anything.
9:13 Speaker 00 Hanfu is royal and sumptuous and basically impractical. The girls taking selfies around the Forbidden City needed to move very slowly and hike up their big skirt when they walked. But Hanfu was technically banned by the dynasty that came after them.
9:28 Speaker 02 The last dynasty who lived in the Forbidden City, they are not the Han's. They are the Manchurians.
9:34 Speaker 00 The Manchurians established the Qing Dynasty, which lasted until 1912. Like, it lasted a long time. This was the last dynasty in China. And you can kind of see it edging a little bit towards modernity. The Manchurian garb is a little more practical.
9:52 Speaker 02 The sleeves are shorter.
9:54 Speaker 00 Oh, right, right, right. And they're more compact. They're not these, like, big bell fur-lined things.
9:59 Speaker 02 And they were trousers. Uh, they were, there are trousers.
10:01 Speaker 00 And the Manchurians, when they took over the region we now know as China, they enforced their style of dress all over the land. And to give you an idea of what it looked like, there was this book written in 1909 by the wife of a missionary, Alicia Little, and it's called "In the Land of the Blue Gown," because that was the ubiquitous style of menswear in the Manchurian dynasty: long gowns with loose pants under it. And in this book, she even writes about how a Chinese tailor told her that foreigners want everything way too tight and, quote, "firmly declines to make any more foreign clothes. They give him too much anxiety," he says. So, this is important.
10:42 Speaker 00 That tailor was highlighting this fundamental difference in the way that Chinese dressing worked, which is that it emphasized the fabric. In Europe and the United States, fabrics were tortured into position with tight stitching. But in China, men and women wore large swaths of cloth with very few cuts and very loose stitching to let the fabric take center stage. And it was about having the pattern be as continuous and uninterrupted as possible. Like, the collars aren't turned down to disrupt the cloth, they're turned up to continue it. And when you think about those knotted rope Chinese-style buttons, they're sometimes called frog fastenings, note that they're sewn on top of the fabric rather than cutting buttonholes.
11:27 Speaker 00 It's all about keeping the cloth intact, not only to appreciate it, but to maybe reuse it, or you take out the stitches to wash it. It's just a different approach to clothing. And yet, those loose Manchurian robes would lead to the height of tight, sexy Chinese femininity. The dress that I assumed was the classic Chinese dress.
11:49 Speaker 02 The qipao is originated from this because they have this collar.
11:52 Speaker 00 Yeah.
11:54 Speaker 02 And it's long and it's open from the side.
11:56 Speaker 00 You know the qipao, even if you don't know it by name. The qipao is that form-fitting Chinese dress with the Mandarin collar and the big slit up the side.
12:04 Speaker 04 I think the way that most people would think of qipao probably is along the lines of the qipao seen in "In the Mood for Love," the Wong Kar Wai movie.
12:12 Speaker 00 If you've seen "In the Mood for Love" or seen stills from it, you have seen Maggie Chung absolutely wearing the hell out of the most delicious, shimmering, high-collar sheath dresses in luxurious patterns that hug her figure.
12:25 Speaker 04 In the year 2000, that was the first time I'd ever seen or been inspired by qipao. It was in that film.
12:31 Speaker 00 Casey Hall is a journalist and an author who's been living in Shanghai for 18 years.
12:35 Speaker 04 Covering a lot of the kind of fashion industry and consumer industry, what people are buying and not buying.
12:41 Speaker 00 So Casey brought me to some shops in Shanghai's tiny qipao district.
12:47 Speaker 04 She said that your figure would look great in a qipao. You should wear a qipao.
12:51 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, the store owner was trying to get me to buy a qipao because it's her store and she's selling qipao. But also, she had no problem with a white American lady wearing one of these.
13:02 Speaker 04 She's saying in many ways, it's more appropriate for Western women to wear them because of their shape, because they have like a curvy chest.
13:09 Speaker 00 Yeah.
13:09 Speaker 04 And a curvy bum, so it looks really beautiful. It's very suitable.
13:13 Speaker 00 It's also because the qipao, especially in Shanghai, was considered an extremely international dress.
13:20 Speaker 04 The evolution of the qipao, it's always been about women trying to be more independent and modern. They wanted to like also feel more international as well.
13:32 Speaker 00 Casey and I went to see this big exhibit at the Shanghai Museum called "Qipao: Glamour and Modernity Beyond Shanghai." And the exhibit arranged all the dresses chronologically so you could see how the qipao evolved from the loose Manchurian. In robes after the last dynasty fell.
13:49 Speaker 04 After the fall of the Qing in 1911, this is what young women started wearing. And it was like a copy of what the male intellectuals were wearing.
13:59 Speaker 00 A lot of young girls were going to university for the first time, and so they wore big robes over pants.
14:04 Speaker 04 Shaking off the dynastic tradition of the patriarchal society they'd been living under, and it was a signal of their independence and modernity.
14:12 Speaker 00 And then eventually, the tunic got more form-fitting, and the trousers went away.
14:16 Speaker 04 And they just kept getting lighter and lighter, and tighter and tighter, and more and more colorful, and playing with different lengths and embroidery and materials, until like 20s and 30s.
14:27 Speaker 00 And in the 1930s, the dresses got real tight. This is when you start to see that high leg slit come in. It's just a way to be able to move in this tight, tight qipao.
14:37 Speaker 04 This was the version of modern that they wanted in 1930. When they wanted to go out, they wanted to party.
14:41 Speaker 00 Especially in the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai, which in the 1930s was known as the Paris of the East.
14:48 Speaker 04 Like 1930 Shanghai would have been just the most fun time to be living in Shanghai. It was like an absolute party town. I think it was J.G. Ballard in his book, who was talking about growing up in Shanghai. And actually, during the war against the Japanese, his family was interned in a camp. And he said it was the first time he had seen his parents sober in his life.
15:11 Speaker 00 The world came to Shanghai in part because it was like wild. China was still getting its act together after the last dynasty fell.
15:18 Speaker 04 Honestly, there was a bit of a power vacuum. The government at the time was not super powerful. There were a lot of uneven treaties between China and Western powers, including the French, the British, Americans, Japanese also. So that's why there was like this influx of foreigners.
15:35 Speaker 00 And Shanghai was mostly a fun time for the foreigners. A lot of Chinese were not allowed to enter parks and public places.
15:42 Speaker 04 So it's like a whole lot of people were coming from all over the world to trade with China.
15:47 Speaker 00 The qipao became the dress of the cosmopolitan Chinese woman. And this was really important. Like back in the 19th century, China had a reputation. For being very backwards and using foot binding. But then came the progressive, free-thinking Chinese woman wearing her tight qipao mingling regularly with other cultures in Shanghai.
16:09 Speaker 04 There was like an idea of Chinese women wanting to show off what it is to be a modern, beautiful, feminine Chinese woman.
16:20 Speaker 00 The qipao was tight and molded like a foreigner's dress, but was still very Chinese with the knotted frog clasps and the emphasis on beautiful cloth and the high collar. It was a suit, but it's got, but it's like a qipao sheath with a little matching jacket over it.
16:36 Speaker 04 I bet this actually comes from outside of Shanghai at this point. Because after 1949, a lot of the qipao tailors from Shanghai moved to Hong Kong, which is where you see in the kind of 1950s and 60s, a real explosion of, one in Cantonese is called chongsam, chongsam culture.
16:54 Speaker 00 Technically, what Maggie Chung is wearing in In the Mood for Love is not a qipao, but a chongsam, because the movie is set in 1960s Hong Kong.
17:02 Speaker 04 Chongsam is like, it just means long dress, I think, in Cantonese. But it is essentially, it looks the same as a qipao. It really was boosted by the influx of qipao tailors from Shanghai.
17:13 Speaker 00 The qipao tailors all fled mainland China and brought their craft all over Asia.
17:18 Speaker 04 It went from Shanghai to Hong Kong, but then also kind of spread around the Chinese diaspora in Singapore and Malaysia and other countries as well. The qipao from Shanghai took on a life of its own outside of Shanghai during the period when people weren't wearing it here.
17:32 Speaker 00 And people weren't wearing qipao in Shanghai or anywhere in mainland China. Were people wearing qipao's?
17:39 Speaker 05 No, no, no, no, no.
17:41 Speaker 00 Not in 72?
17:43 Speaker 05 No. One or two people might have done so in the privacy of their homes. But 1972 was still a pretty tough time.
17:53 Speaker 00 This is Antonia Fane, who's kind of a legend in Chinese fashion history. She's associated with the University of Melbourne.
17:59 Speaker 05 And I have spent some years in China, starting when I was a student in the 1970s.
18:06 Speaker 00 I wanted to ask what you saw people wearing when you were teaching in Shanghai in 1972?
18:12 Speaker 05 There was this extraordinary uniformity across the society. It was very, very rare for you to turn your head because someone was wearing something different.
18:26 Speaker 00 From the 1950s until essentially the 1980s, people in China dressed like Mao Zedong.
18:32 Speaker 05 Jackets and trousers, just duragur.
18:36 Speaker 00 And Mao wore what looks to our eyes like a chore coat with matching pants.
18:40 Speaker 05 Mao, like all people within the Communist Party, would wear a jacket with four pockets. That's what it is.
18:49 Speaker 00 This is sometimes called the Mao suit. But the interesting thing is Mao did not invent this suit. And it's not really known as the Mao suit in China.
18:58 Speaker 05 What we call the Mao suit actually is the Zhongshan Zhong.
19:02 Speaker 00 This suit, the Zhongshan suit, sorry, my Chinese is so bad. The Zhongshan suit was created after the fall of the last royal dynasty in 1911. It was designed by the father of the new Chinese republic, Sun Yat-sen. And you can see, it kind of follows similar logic to the Chi Pao. It's very international, but also very Chinese. The suit is based on Japanese and Prussian military clothes, and it clearly has a lot of Western elements. It has a turned down collar. It has buttons with buttonholes. But it has distinctly Chinese symbolism. Like the four pockets were supposed to represent the four virtues of the new republic, which are benevolence, loyalty, integrity, and shame. And then there were supposed to be five buttons down the front, which symbolized the separation of the Five Powers.
19:46 Speaker 00 And then there are three small cuff buttons, which were supposed to represent three people's principles. You get it. It was embedded with all these values that were put forward by the founder of the republic, Sun Yat-sen, who was not a communist.
19:58 Speaker 05 The so-called Mao suit was actually worn by the officials of that earlier government.
20:04 Speaker 00 This is just what government officials wore. And this continues into 1949, when the communists take over. They're still wearing these suits. And then, under communism, technically, everyone in China works for the government.
20:16 Speaker 05 The workforce gradually became a state workforce with accompanying Regulations for uniforms to be worn by the railway workers, the teachers, the policemen and so on.
20:30 Speaker 00 A lot of professions were required to wear some version of this suit.
20:34 Speaker 05 In an economy where there was very little spare money, those working clothes were sometimes also your non-working clothes, your leisure clothes.
20:43 Speaker 00 But the wild part was there wasn't any overt rule saying it was compulsory to wear this uniform all the time, but everybody did.
20:51 Speaker 05 Jacket and trousers is the clothing of the worker, the peasant and the soldier. You don't do any of those things, wearing skirts or robes. It really became very, very standard, what people wanted to wear in the 1950s.
21:04 Speaker 00 There were tiny variations. You could have like a slightly different style pocket or fastening, a little range of colors and materials, but it was never meant to be pushed too far. Anyone who stood out too much could come under criticism.
21:16 Speaker 05 For example, wearing your jacket undone. This is sort of standard, laid-back, Western style. Chinese always buttoned all of those up. If you didn't button it, someone would say something to you.
21:30 Speaker 00 Oh.
21:31 Speaker 05 Your wife would say something to you. Your kids might say something to you. You should button it.
21:37 Speaker 00 This was a style that was enforced by society.
21:40 Speaker 05 Even though it seems as though the society is doing this to themselves, you have to remember how important the state is.
21:47 Speaker 00 Everyone was falling into step to regulate each other.
21:50 Speaker 05 Well, it is a regime of fear, you know. They fear being noticed because it will bring trouble on them. Clothing conformity is absolutely part of that.
22:00 Speaker 00 And it doesn't mean there wasn't resistance, but usually it was in absurdly tiny ways, like this moment of rebellion chronicled in the famous memoir Wild Swans.
22:10 Speaker 06 My mother had been longing to wear a dash of color.
22:13 Speaker 00 My friend Julie is reading this part when author Jung Rong talks about how her mother rebelled in the 1960s.
22:18 Speaker 06 My mother turned her pink collar out and spent the whole day feeling terribly excited and nervous. Mrs. Ting was even more daring. She not only turned her collar outside her uniform, but rolled up her sleeves so that a broad band of pink showed on each arm. My mother was staggered, almost awestruck at this defiance. As expected, there were plenty of disapproving glances, but Mrs. Ting held her chin up.
22:41 Speaker 00 Wearing anything other than a Mao suit was shocking and got attention, which is funny because now it's the exact opposite.
22:50 Speaker 06 If you wear a Mao suit in China, people will stare at you.
22:54 Speaker 00 Julie Bluse is the China correspondent for the Dutch paper, The Volkskrant. And this was her question.
23:00 Speaker 06 Fashion always goes in cycles, so you would expect this year, it's 50 years since Mao died, 50 years since the Cultural Revolution ended. Why hasn't it made a comeback yet?
23:10 Speaker 00 Today Mao suits are actually kind of hard to find. Most were worn to smithereens and thrown out. And only a few were preserved by collectors like this guy that Julie found.
23:19 Speaker 06 Arriving for the interview with the Mao suit guy.
23:23 Speaker 00 你好
23:23 Speaker 06 你好
23:25 Speaker 00 祝你自己 Deng was born in 1977. He remembers the suits from his childhood. 我们穿中山装都是定制的，按照自己的身材 And he really admired that these Mao suits were always custom made. Like your mom or your tailor would make them for you out of sturdy, long-lasting materials. It's the kind of stuff menswear guys would drool over today. 普通最日常的一种穿着 And Deng is particularly partial to the Mao suits that were made for the military, which were extra durable and practical, in kind of a Gorkor way.
23:54 Speaker 06 He said, like, even though this was a period of time where China was extremely poor, they like channeled all their creativity and money into creating these extremely utilitarian, highly functional, beautiful garments.
24:09 Speaker 00 So this collector, like, he loves clothes. It's not like he's into Mao.
24:13 Speaker 06 I mean, this is a guy who really cares about materials. I didn't get the sense that it was a very nationalist idea.
24:17 Speaker 00 But Deng does not dare wear his collection of Mao suits out.
24:21 Speaker 06 So he was like, yeah, that actually makes me very uncomfortable. So he just collects it.
24:25 Speaker 00 The main person you're going to see wearing a Mao suit these days, and only sometimes, is President Xi Jinping.
24:31 Speaker 06 It's meaningful that Xi Jinping is still wearing a Mao suit.
24:35 Speaker 00 What does it mean?
24:36 Speaker 06 It means that he sees himself as part of that tradition and part of those same aspirations as Mao had before him to a certain extent.
24:45 Speaker 00 But what the Mao suit symbolizes, that sort of mass-enforced uniformity, will never happen again, at least not with clothes.
24:55 Speaker 00 Like President Xi tried to regulate fashion. He proposed a new law in 2023.
25:00 Speaker 06 Basically, it proposed to outlaw clothing or symbols that were detrimental to the spirit of the Chinese nation and hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.
25:11 Speaker 00 The language was intentionally vague.
25:14 Speaker 06 And then it seemed like it was also targeting people in drag, guys wearing what you could call women's clothing.
25:20 Speaker 00 And this proposed legislation did not pass.
25:22 Speaker 06 There were so many people who were just like, this is something that we will not accept.
25:27 Speaker 00 After Mao died, the state could no longer regulate fashion, and it was never going to again. The toothpaste was out of the tube.
25:34 Speaker 06 And I thought that that was very meaningful because, obviously, it takes a lot for Chinese people to go on social media and voice their disapproval of any government policy.
25:44 Speaker 00 People in China never want to lose the ability to dress in the way they want.
25:48 Speaker 06 The great mission of Xi Jinping is the great rejuvenation of the nation. And so I think there is a sense of like, what does that look like? What does the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people look like? To be honest, I do not think that's the Mao suit at all. I think that's definitely more in the direction of the hanfu. It's looking like the princesses.
26:11 Speaker 00 Young people prefer to dress like royals from hundreds of years ago, certainly more than they want to wear the Mao suit. And actually, even more than they want to wear the tight cosmopolitan qipao. The qipao is for grandmas now.
26:24 Speaker 04 Yeah, qipao is for grandmas.
26:26 Speaker 00 Shanghai correspondent Casey Halligan.
26:28 Speaker 04 Most Chinese women will wear a qipao on their wedding day. I actually wear a qipao at my engagement party.
26:33 Speaker 00 But by and large, people don't tend to wear a qipao in a normal, everyday way. The only people who do that tend to be older.
26:40 Speaker 04 Maybe it's because they were something they were prevented from wearing when they were young. It became something more special for them, you know? You know, young people are not going to embrace that style so easily when it's something they see their mom or their grandma wearing.
26:51 Speaker 00 And there's another reason the qipao isn't as popular now.
26:55 Speaker 05 Qipao, in particular, has faced a lot of difficulties in establishing itself as national dress.
27:01 Speaker 00 Why? Because it's sexy?
27:03 Speaker 05 Well, no.
27:04 Speaker 00 Just embarrassing myself in front of Professor Finay.
27:07 Speaker 05 Actually, because qi is the other word for Manchu.
27:10 Speaker 00 Qi pow, that dress, can literally translate to "the robe of the Manchurian people."
27:17 Speaker 05 Very, very difficult for this to be formally adopted as national dress because there is a Manchu minority.
27:25 Speaker 00 Unlike, again, the vast majority of Chinese, who are ethnically Han, many of whom feel like they have been robbed of their ethnic style for hundreds of years and who like to dress like that earlier Ming Dynasty.
27:38 Speaker 05 Hence, the whole idea of harmful. Go back to the Han Dynasty and you might find something that is purely Han that hasn't been adulterated by all these aliens, the Manchus, the Mongols, the West, the Japanese.
27:54 Speaker 00 A younger generation is digging deeper and deeper into Chinese history, and brands are following behind them. After the break.
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31:44 Speaker 00 Ivy Ye loves to wear hanfu and dress up like a dynastic princess.
31:48 Speaker 01 Nowadays, we should wear more traditional clothes in our daily lives.
31:53 Speaker 00 She's worked in fashion PR and tech. And when she worked at Alipay, a huge company, like the way that everybody pays for stuff on their phones in China, Ivy Ye was the leader of Alipay's hanfu club, where everyone could wear hanfu on Fridays, and it became like a casual Friday sort of thing.
32:10 Speaker 01 Fridays, like casual Fridays, in the office.
32:15 Speaker 00 Amateur hour over here, I committed the cardinal sin of recording in a restaurant, so you can't really hear what Ivy is saying. But I'll summarize. She said, at work, her hanfu club wore so-called "modern" hanfu. It wasn't overtly walking around looking like Queen Amidala, like all the girls I saw in the Forbidden City. There are companies making casual versions of the 1400s clothes. Ivy showed me a picture of them. Okay, so it's like a long, traditional-looking skirt, but with a cool little blouse. It's really lovely. It only sort of vaguely references the empress clothing, but way toned down. So toned down that I realized I'd actually seen it before. Oh my god, that's what the Adidas dress was.
32:59 Speaker 01 Oh my god.
33:00 Speaker 00 There was this skirt that I saw at the Adidas store in China, which I thought was so cool, and I almost bought it. But I didn't realize that that might have been a version of modern hanfu.
33:12 Speaker 00 After dinner, Ivy brought me to the nearest Adidas store, which wasn't hard to find. There are so many malls in Shanghai.
33:17 Speaker 01 So I asked, "Do you have the dress?" She asked, "Do you say the Xingzhongshi, the new Chinese style, the Ma Mian Qing?"
33:24 Speaker 00 And Ivy asked them about that skirt that I liked, and they were like, "Yeah, the hanfu-inspired one."
33:29 Speaker 01 You're right, this skirt is really, is truly inspired. By the Chinese style, the Ma Mian Chen.
33:36 Speaker 00 Wow, so it's totally sold out. The Chinese history-inspired clothing is wildly popular now. I mean, it's great. I love it. And Adidas is especially going buck wild with it. Yeah, you see all the elements like in contemporary fashion. Yeah.
33:54 Speaker 01 More and more Chinese elements on the fashion brand, sports brand.
33:58 Speaker 00 And sometimes it's a little controversial. Like when Adidas released this track jacket with these knot buttons all down the front, and it kind of looks like a magua, which is Manchurian. Did you know that this Adidas jacket is the most hated jacket in China right now? The internet flipped out.
34:18 Speaker 00 This TikTok goes on to explain that this jacket is based on a Manchurian style, which was mandated during the Manchurian period, when all the Han styles and Hanfu was taken away. And he characterizes the Manchurian dynasty, the Qing dynasty, as a bad era in China because it coincided with the Western Industrial Revolution, but chose not to engage with it. And this period is known in China as the century of humiliation. So ipso facto, this TikToker says, no one wants to be reminded of the Manchurian clothes of the Qing dynasty.
34:50 Speaker 00 I still think it's pretty fire, and it's an important part of China's history. But what do you think? I mean, what do I know? I think the jacket looks great. I love that Adidas jacket. I think it's so cool. Same with the qipao. I love both of these styles, but both are Manchurian. And so they're a little controversial. But I was like, what is going on here? Is this racist that nothing is considered really Chinese that's Manchurian? Nobody really thinks of themselves as Manchu, right? Because there were so few Manchu around even the early 20th century. Professor Karin teaches cultural history at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, although I happened to catch him while he was in Taiwan. He is, like most Chinese, ethnically Han, probably.
35:33 Speaker 00 That's my ethnicity, as far as I know. It's Han, right? People are 90, 92% Han. And sure, there's some thought that Hanfu is about ethnic Han superiority. There's an Australian scholar who thinks that it's all about Han. Ethnic nationalism. And then maybe something to to that. Some people might argue against something like hanfu, which I see as a bit more complicated. Hanfu is not entirely about the glory in the past of the Han ethnicity. In some ways, it's popular for practical reasons, like it's looser and more comfortable than the tight-fitting qipao. It actually reveals less. It's much more comfortable, yeah. Right, right. It's flowy, long sleeves. The hanfu movement also became a bit of a catch-all,
36:18 Speaker 00 like a shorthand for getting into everything ancient, including clothes from the Song and Tang Dynasty and lots of other dynasties. Like, you see it if you go to Xi'an in the West, which is Professor Ren's hometown. The capital of the Tang Dynasty in the 7th century. And you can see all these young women walking around in the tourist spots. They're wearing like mock Tang Dynasty dress, right? Like, I see that as a genre of hanfu, even though it's not from the Han Dynasty. It's just that the Manchurian era, the Qing Dynasty, the last dynasty, became touchy. I was trained as a Qing historian. And Qing is 644 to 1911, right? So it really goes right up to the cusp of World War I. The Manchurians conquered a lot of what is considered modern China, including Tibet and Inner Mongolia and what was historically Manchuria.
37:03 Speaker 00 So politically, China needs to claim all of these areas. Mainland China PRC today still claims the territory of 18th century Qing Empire. So it's interesting. You'd think China would be like, yeah, this is all our land. This is all us, that they would be all about the Qing Dynasty. And for a while, they were. In the late 1990s, throughout the 2000s, there was this Qing Dynasty craze. There were a lot of TV shows about the Qing Dynasty, like this extremely popular show from 1998 called My Fair Princess, which was sort of a prince and the pauper story about mistaken identities among two princesses. And this kind of plot was much easier to do in the Manchu period. Royal costume didn't look that much more extravagant than the commoner's costume.
37:49 Speaker 00 So this was really popular for a while. Shows like this really kicked off the interest in dressing like a princess. I think the legacy of that is the princesses that still walk around for bed and pallets. At the same time, the Qing Dynasty, the Manchurians, were coming under some scrutiny. The generations that came before my current Generation, people working in the nineties. This was a movement called New Qing History. Uh, there's a group especially from North America who began to study the Manchu language. And they proposed that the Qing was not just another Chinese empire, that it was different ethnically and culturally. And it's brought a lot of new sort of understandings about the Qing Empire and also what came before it, what came after it.
38:32 Speaker 00 Then the Chinese state started eyeing these very suspiciously, like what are these foreign Qing scholars doing? Messing with our notions of history and Chinese identity and what land is ours? And so Qing history becomes fraught to be debated in public. There's been a move away in terms of popular culture, and I'm thinking about movies and TV dramas away from the Qing Dynasty. This is with some states, I don't know if interference is the right word, but encouragement. Because they're uptight about telling the history of the Qing Dynasty. And then Han Fu came in to sort of shift the conversation away from the Qing Dynasty. Han Fu kind of slipped in partly to discourage popular talk about the Qing.
39:17 Speaker 00 While keeping this lucrative and very fun historical trend totally intact. But of course, the people that you're interested in, the people who are interested in dressing up like princesses and the people we encounter in the streets are not the scholars. Although they're getting there, there was a massive popular interest in archaeology and museums and all kinds of Chinese history. A lot of local museums, provincial museums, a museum boom. And it's not just about Han identity. Because China is a mix, all the cultures, all the kind of people they come together. Ivy, the founder of the Casual Friday Han Fu Club, likes to wear everything from Chinese history. She wears qipao, she wears Tibetan clothes, she wears Uyghur clothes. She's just exploring different cultures and fashion history.
40:02 Speaker 00 Oh, she's Uyghur? Yes. And she's really good at it. Oh my God, and this is you? Yes. You look amazing. For so many people who engage in Hanfu, this is just self-expression and curiosity. And it's just a curious anthropological experiment. Ivy, that's so good. To her, they are all parts of Chinese history. And they all feed into a larger fashion movement that's called, and I'm gonna butcher this, Guochao.
40:31 Speaker 01 Guochao is like a recent trend in China.
40:34 Speaker 00 Ivy's boyfriend, William, stepped in here to explain it to me.
40:37 Speaker 01 People are more and more combining the Chinese traditional thing with the modern elements.
40:43 Speaker 00 Okay.
40:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:43 Speaker 00 Would Adidas be Guochao?
40:46 Speaker 01 Yeah. No.
40:46 Speaker 00 Yeah?
40:47 Speaker 01 No. Yeah. No.
40:48 Speaker 00 Ivy and William bicker in this really cute way.
40:50 Speaker 01 The style of the jacket we saw just... Only one single product, but then in total... That's also Guochao, okay. But in total, it's still a Western brand, okay?
40:57 Speaker 00 This is a huge philosophical debate right now. Can a Western brand just tack on Chinese elements and be like, "We're Chinese now"? Like, I had arrived shortly after Chinese New Year, and all the major brands were putting out all this horse-branded stuff for Year of the Horse. Does that do it?
41:14 Speaker 01 No. Adding Chinese elements, so you can call Guochao. That's our... Otherwise, if they all use horse face, can you call their Guochao brand?
41:23 Speaker 00 And I think this is particularly a source of tension because China is in the middle of a big fashion reinvention. There's a new generation of fashion designers who are proving that "Made in China" does not mean cheap knockoffs.
41:36 Speaker 04 I mean, all of these are young Chinese designers, and you can see elements of traditional Chinese design in what they're doing, but they've really updated it for modern life.
41:46 Speaker 00 Casey Hall, the consumerism reporter, told me this is a phenomenon where children of apparel manufacturers don't just want to make flimsy clothes for the foreign market. They want to make high-quality clothes for Chinese customers.
41:58 Speaker 04 You'll notice a lot of the collars, like the short collars, some of the buttons and enclosures. They, you know, they look like what you would imagine in a traditional Chinese outfit. But the cuts and the fits are not necessarily what you would see in traditional Chinese.
42:13 Speaker 00 High-end designers are updating traditional styles, incorporating Chinese motifs and symbols. Oh, it does look like a teabag. One example of this is a Chinese luxury leather handbag company called Songmont.
42:26 Speaker 01 Songmont is, it's brand is...
42:28 Speaker 00 Totally guachao, okay? Both William and Ivy could agree that Songmott was a shining example of guachao. These bags are all made in China, and elements of the bags subtly resemble Chinese cultural talisman. And this one's designed to look like... Fengzheng, dujia. Oh, a kite. Oh, so there are these subtle nods in it. I mean, some of these nods work better than others, but the bags are all full of references from across China and Chinese history. So it has these Tibetan beads. And of course, the Chinese government loves this. What better way to unite the population and expand a sense of the culture and history of China than through this modern fashion diplomacy?
43:10 Speaker 01 It's just about China having a lot of history. But having a lot of history means that China is a country with a long civilization, and it needs to be taken seriously by the world.
43:19 Speaker 00 Professor Ren again.
43:20 Speaker 01 The consumers of Panfu are also the generation that's seen their country become much more prosperous.
43:26 Speaker 00 The pride and patriotism make so much sense. There's this undeniable optimism in China, this feeling of being on the up and up. But conversely, there isn't a lot of reason to feel any differently.
43:39 Speaker 06 I think it's also just like not being used to seeing media that's constantly talking about all the things that are wrong within your own country.
43:47 Speaker 00 There is a great digital wall between China and the rest of the world. No Google, no Instagram. I could not even get my VPN to work in the hotel wifi. The criticism does not come in, which is something that Julie Blouset, the Dutch journalist who writes for the Volkskrant, thinks about a lot.
44:03 Speaker 06 Just yesterday, I was just looking at my own newspaper's website, and I think top five article or something was like, "One of the worst things that the Netherlands have done is our childcare system," or something like that. And I was like, this is just, if only I could show this to the Chinese people who I'm interviewing, just to give them a sense of how used we are to constantly criticizing our own government and not feeling like that means that we don't love our country or we don't appreciate our country.
44:33 Speaker 00 I've been thinking a lot about this recently as America has hosted our pathetic 250th birthday celebration. My country embarrasses me and pains me so much for reasons that you don't have to hear me harp on and on about. And yet, I love Americans. I love our stupid optimism and how friendly we are and how we jaywalk and drive too fast and compliment random strangers. I am so American through and through. I mean, I love this nutty, messed up place so much. And the most shocking thing for me about China, more than the self-parking cars, or the fact that there are fat orange cats on the Great Wall, or that women walk around dressing like dynastic princesses, is that in China,
45:15 Speaker 00 I felt the same way. I was like, I love this messed up place. There was so much that I found objectively terrifying, like the fact that you have to go through a metal detector to use public transit. And yet, there was so much that I adored. I met the most amazing people. I ate delicious food. I loved all the new design and the fashion. I understand that sense of new Chinese pride. There's cultural competence among young Chinese people. I can see in my own students, I might try to discourage a little bit. Not because you shouldn't love your country. Professor Ren put it well. Once you feel too strongly about one place, you start to think about other places
45:56 Speaker 00 as just opposites or foils and not as complicated places. And then you lose sight of how your own place is actually complicated. And I decided to embrace this cultural complexity by buying a bunch of new expensive Chinese designer clothes. They're so cool.
46:23 Speaker 00 Huge thanks to Julie Bluse, my Mao suit correspondent, and Yabuchi, my favorite pessimist, the one who brought me to China in the first place. Thank you both for inspiring this story and for taking an early listen to it. Thank you also to Casey Hall and William Zhang for being my local guides, Drew Haupt for taking pictures and being the best travel companion, and everyone who I approach. ...down the street. I am, again, so sorry about my Chinese pronunciation. Big shout out also to Ellen Horn and Dan Pashman. Music, as ever, is by Ray Royal, Lelitone, and Sasami. And if you want to see how the Manchu robe evolved into the Qipao and get a look at what some of these princesses are dressed like, head to articlesofinterest.substack.com.
47:07 Speaker 00 And, by the way, now that you've made it all the way here to the end of the credits, I have a fun little announcement to make. I'm starting a new series with Derek Guy, who you might know as the Twitter Menswear Guy. He's a friend of the show. He's been on before. But we're going to start reading all of the great fashion philosophers together and bring you our summaries, insights, and the ways that these foundational thinkers have built our modern concepts of fashion and what we wear. I'm really excited. I'm already learning so much. It's going to come up on the Substack, so subscribe if you want to stay in the loop.
Previous Sizes Next The Philosophy Club: Mandeville Page updated October 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated