Title: Can we speak of fashion in early nineteenth-century China? Reflections on dress and modernitySubmitted by: Antonia Finnane, Department of History, University of Melbourne, AustraliaQuentin Bell once remarked of Chinese dress that changes in it were slight and occurred slowly over long periods of time. Given a relatively high degree of stability in Chinese dress, when does it become meaningful to talk about 'fashion' in the context of indigenous dress practices? This question is explored in the context of the city of Yangzhou in the early nineteenth century. Novels and 'random jottings' provide glimpses of a dynamic clothing culture here, contemporaries commenting on the appearance of new dress styles. My hypothesis is that the seeds of fashion were germinated by Western trade, the effects of which are observable in other aspects of local culture in this albeit distant, inland city. Close textual research into Chinese clothing in the nineteenth century may well prove clothing in the late Qing, like fiction, to be a case of repressed modernity. Return to Abstracts menuCarol Burnett Phone: 61 - 3 - 9349 1899 Email: c.burnett@asialink.unimelb.edu.au
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