Abstract
China’s government used to restrict what its people were allowed to wear. Now trends are outrageous, but fashion is not completely removed from politics, writes
A young woman wears a plastic seedling accessory in Chengdu, China
Credit: A Zhang Peng/LightRocket/Getty Images
Zhang is part of a new wave of fashion designers to emerge from China in recent years and as Zhang’s schedule attests, they’re in hot demand. They’ve become a staple on the global fashion circuit and their designs are worn by the fashion world’s elite. Zhang counts actors Gwyneth Paltrow and Keira Knightley amongst his fans. Guo Pei, another famous Chinese designer, has dressed singer Rihanna; Masha Ma is loved by models Naomi Campbell, Georgia May Jagger and singer Lady Gaga.
Typically trained in the West, their favourite educational institutions being Parsons School of Design in New York and London’s Central Saint Martins, these designers have been able to benefit from a more liberal and open China. Their styles are as much personal as they are cosmopolitan, differing from one designer to the next, and at times very daring. Of the designers Index on Censorship spoke to, none said there was anything they wouldn’t be able to design. Providing they don’t stitch political slogans onto garments, their clothes are canvasses where censorship does not exist and where the imagination can run free.
In a country where freedoms are hard won and where recent crackdowns on freedom of expression have reached artist communities, this is not something to brush off.
It has had a knock-on effect within Chinese society too. Take a stroll down Nanluoguxiang and this quickly becomes evident. Once a quaint alley in central Beijing, which 100 years ago would have seen women walking around with bound feet, the cobbled streets of Nanluoguxiang now heave with cool cafes and boutiques which cater to the city’s avant-garde population. Style is serious business here. People wear anything from grungy, skater clothes to branded high street fashion, creating a cauldron of different looks. Playfulness is a firm feature. Two years ago young women could be seen wearing cat ears. A year later it was plastic plants. Comparisons with Harajuku, the shopping district of Tokyo known for its outlandish style, are easy to make.
“The Chinese market is willing to discover new styles. Chinese customers are not conservative at all, especially the younger generations. They’re very open-minded,” said Liushu Lei, one half of the label Shushu/Tong.
“The party has retreated from the details of people’s lives and people are now enjoying plenty of personal freedom, including what to wear. Anything I wouldn’t wear? I wouldn’t wear a suit because that’s just not me!” says Lijia Zhang, author of Socialism is Great! Zhang came of age in the 1980s and has watched China change.
“Even in early 80s, fashion was very politicised. Labaku – bell-bottom trousers – were labelled as ‘bourgeois trash’. I never had a promotion during my 10 years at the factory because my bosses thought I wore a perm. In those days only people with bourgeois tendencies would wear a perm,” says Zhang.
As Zhang highlights, the transformation of Chinese fashion is recent. Most date the changes back to 1996, when the fashion designer Ma Ke established her ready-to-wear label Exception de Mixmind, the first of its kind in China.
Before then, fashion was drab, form often giving way to function. It was also highly political. The 1920s and 1930s, when Shanghai became known as the Paris of the East, were a brief interlude in a century otherwise dominated by conformity. The peak of this domination happened under Chairman Mao. At the heart of his vision was a country where everyone was equal in mind and appearance. Out went the qipao, the traditional figurehugging Chinese dress, and in came the ubiquitous Mao suit. Personal adornment, be it jewellery or make-up, was banned and any transgression not tolerated.
When Mao died in 1976 and Deng Xiaoping took over, the party repositioned itself. Market reforms called for a new approach to commerce and with that fashion. Initially this was more geared towards the export market. Then, as the economy took off, so too did domestic fashion.
Men wear Mao suits at a train station in China in 1982, a period when strict rules restricted fashion, and Western styles were severely frowned upon
Credit: Robert Schediwy
To be sure, fashion alone cannot compensate for the lack of political freedom in China. But on a personal level it has played a crucial role in fostering selfexpression, individuality and confidence for the Chinese population at large. Designers know this and have used their new-found fame to expand on this. Singer and designer Gia Wang, for example, has a T-shirt line that features images and phrases about sexual empowerment. Masha Ma is known for making proclamations online, such as when she posted to her Weibo account: “Be yourself, you don’t have to fake anything.”
And yet for all its freedoms, fashion is not entirely removed from politics. The movements of the party continue to reverberate throughout society right through to the runway. In recent years, fashion has been particularly shaken by Xi Jinping’s anticorruption campaign. The campaign was launched when he came to power in 2012 and sought to crack down on all forms of conspicuous consumption. Spending big on designer labels had been a staple of China’s rich and powerful. It is now passé and Western brands have seen sales figures slide as Chinese designers’ sales have risen.
The anti-corruption campaign also coincided with a government call to move away from “made in China”, bywords for cheap, mass-produced products, to “designed in China”. People are being encouraged to support home-grown brands, and designers encouraged to act as ambassadors for China. “There’s great championing of the idea that China can use soft power, their creative expression, to move forward out of the manufacturing rut,” said Tim Lindgren, a designer who works between Australia and China. “The opportunity for local designers is ripe right now.”
Lindgren draws attention to an uglier side of Chinese fashion. Like other industries in China, guanxi or good connections are important. All legal documents, from work contracts through to lease of land for workshops or stores, must go through government officials. Even Chinese fashion weeks are run in partnership with the government.
“If you wish to build a business with any bricks and mortar, you need to be on at least speaking terms with officials,” he explained, adding that Ma Ke’s husband is politically correct and because of that she gets to dress Xi Jinping’s wife.
Lindgren goes on to tell Index about a designer who was on the wrong side politically. Helen Lee, now a successful designer whose label is stocked by the luxury Hong Kong and Chinese fashion retailer, Lane Crawford, encountered several hurdles when she was starting out. First, her warehouse was taken away from her to become a coffee shop as part of Shanghai’s redevelopment in 2010. Then, she had to pay a hefty sum to participate in a fashion week the same year, with the first two rows of the show being allocated to officials. There was no space for her clients as a result. These same rules apply today.
“If you keep your eye on the money, who is paying what and why, it’s not quite working the same way as here,” Lindgren said.