Draft:Jiang qing dress (Jiang qingfu)

Background

During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), dress in China became a heavily politicized matter. Army uniforms, cadre suits and the Mao suit became ubiquitous among youth and women, the army uniform in particular was associated with the Long March, several Red Guard and women’s groups would adopt this dress during the Cultural Revolution. ^{[2]:18[5]:257-8} It was in this highly constrained fashion world that Jiang Qing would attempt to introduce her garment.

The Jiang Qing dress similar to the Mao Suit would be nicknamed after its designer and wearer, although Mao was not the first to wear nor design the Mao suit, the direct connection between the garment’s image and its wearer is the same. Unlike the Mao suit, however, the Jiang Qing dress was not unisex. In the politicized world of the Cultural Revolution, where women were encouraged to wear trousers and join production teams in industries traditionally dominated by men, the introduction of a distinctly feminine national dress with a hundred pleated skirt appeared at odds with the revolutionary idea of uniformity in dress and labour between the sexes.^[2]:18

Origin and Design

The Jiang Qing dress was designed with a hundred pleated skirt, it may have originated from Sui-Tang paintings of dancing girls. Skirts of such a design became a popular occurrence in China until the late 17^th century.^[2]:8-10

The dress featured a delineated V-neck marked by a white band, as well as floral designs on the upper half of the garment with sleeves that came down to the elbows. The 1974 prototype was made of silk and was the colour blue. The dress often was compared with the more popular bulaji (frock) of the 1950s, except the collar had more theatrical elements.^[2]:15

During the 1974 Tehran Asian Games, Jiang Qing presented the dress as an alternative to the masculine and gender-neutral uniforms of the Mao suit. Later detractors, however, say that the dress looked male from above and female from below.^[2]:18

In its debut, Jiang Qing claimed that the dress was a “newly born item” that had nothing to do with the Four Olds. She exerted great influence in Tianjin Municipality where she encouraged cadre leaders and textile working women to lead the adoption of the dress. She also promoted the dress through revolutionary theatre, ballet and opera.^[2]:18

Promotion and Performance

Jiang Qing had considerable resources and influence to promote the dress. In Tianjin Municipality she mobilized the city’s Revolutionary Committee to promote production and advertising of the dress. She encouraged workers, cadre leaders and the municipal women’s association members to wear it. Beyond this, Jiang Qing was a patron of the fine arts and had considerable influence and strong opinions on the matter.^{[6]:197-202[7]:30}

Jiang Qing believed that art should serve the revolutionary classes and be made both accessible and different from the bourgeois styles. She mandated that portrait painters should be able to paint from memory, and sculptures should capture all the positive qualities of socialist leaders without leaning into the bad. ^[6]:199-200 These opinions affected whether art schools got funding or whether an opera performance would be screened. She used her influence in the fine arts to promote the dress through ballet and opera companies. ^[2]:18 Throughout the 1970s, Jiang Qing would oversee the hightide of revolutionary ballet operas such as The White-Haired Girl and The Red Detachment of Women. ^[8]:188-190 It was through revision and oversight of these operas that she would promote her dress.

The Empress Dress Controversy

On February 8, 1977, the Tianjin Daily, ^[9]:248-9 wrote an article linking the Jiang Qingfu with a personalized empress dress which she commissioned for herself. The polemic article expressed that the dress made to resemble the dress of empresses, with ornamentation and a design which cannot be replicated was to act as a base model from which all the Jiang Qingfu wearer (her subjects) would stem from. Antonia Finnane cites Roxane Witke who argues that "such statements were not necessarily lacking in factual base, but establishing the degree of elaboration or the point at which fantasy meets fact is problematic.” ^[2]:8 Such speculation was used to retrospectively tie the Jiang Qing dress with the empress dress, an idea that lacked photographic record. The link was made through Jiang Qing’s “Criticize Lin Biao, criticize Confucius” campaign of 1974, when the Empress Wu was praised as a progressive historical figure. ^[2]:8 The Tianjin Daily used these separate occasions where Jiang Qing has shown interest in historical costumes, Tang imperial dress, and the rehabilitation of Wu Zetian in her campaign to create an image of Jiang Qing as someone trying to ascend the imperial throne.

Jiang Qing’s personal fondness for skirts is corroborated by historian Roxane Witke, who recorded witnessing Jiang Qing reach into a bag during a private interview and distribute pleated black skirts to her female attendants, declaring “I like skirts… and they’re comfortable in summer.” The attendants, unaccustomed to wearing skirts in place of their customary trousers, sat awkwardly in them the following day.^[10]:287

Decline and Legacy

Despite significant advertising and investment, the dress never attained mainstream popularity outside theatre troupes. The dress would steadily decline in value the 1970s from 20RMB to 4RMB, until eventually disappearing after Jiang Qing’s arrest.^[2]:18-19

References

Bibliography

Andrews, Julia. 2010. “The Art of the Cultural Revolution.” In Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–76, edited by King, Richard, 27–57. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. ISBN 978-0-7748-1543-7.

Chen, Tina Mai. "Dressing for the Party: Clothing, Citizenship, and Gender-Formation in Mao's China." Fashion Theory 5, no. 2 (2001): 143–71.

Cook, Alexander C. The Cultural Revolution on Trial: Mao and the Gang of Four. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-521-76111-6.

Di, Bai. 2010. “Feminism in the Revolutionary Model Ballets The White-Haired Girl and The Red Detachment of Women.” In Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–76, edited by Richard King, 188–202. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. ISBN 978-0-7748-1543-7.

Finnane, Antonia. Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-231-14350-9.

Finnane, Antonia. “Looking for the Jiang Qing Dress: Some Preliminary Findings.” Fashion Theory 9, no. 1 (2005): 3–22. https://doi.org/10.2752/136270405778051518.

Finnane, Antonia. "What Should Chinese Women Wear?" In How to Make a Mao Suit: Clothing the People of Communist China, 1949–1976, 255–89. Cambridge Studies in the History of the People's Republic of China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. ISBN 978-1-009-35999-3.

Schoenhals, Michael. China’s Cultural Revolution, 1966–1969: Not a Dinner Party. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996. ISBN 978-1-56324-736-1.

Sun, Peidong. “The Collar Revolution: Everyday Clothing in Guangdong as Resistance in the Cultural Revolution.” The China Quarterly 227 (2016): 773–95. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741016000692.

Witke, Roxane. Comrade Chiang Ch'ing. 1st ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1977. ISBN 978-0-316-94900-2.