A Fashionable Century

Clothing and accessories from nineteenth-century China reveal much about women's participation in the commercialization of textile handicrafts and the flourishing of urban popular culture. Focusing on women's work and fashion, A Fashionable Century presents an array of visually compelling clothing and accessories neglected by traditional histories of Chinese dress, examining these products' potential to illuminate issues of gender and identity.

In the late Qing, the expansion of production systems and market economies transformed the Chinese fashion system, widening access to fashionable techniques, materials, and imagery. Challenging the conventional production model, in which women embroidered items at home, Silberstein sets fashion within a process of commercialization that created networks of urban guilds, commercial workshops, and subcontracted female workers. These networks gave rise to new trends influenced by performance and prints, and they offered women opportunities to participate in fashion and contribute to local economies and cultures.

Rachel Silberstein draws on vernacular and commercial sources, rather than on the official and imperial texts prevalent in Chinese dress history, to demonstrate that in these fascinating objects--regulated by market desires, rather than imperial edict--fashion formed at the intersection of commerce and culture.

"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"--

A Fashionable Century is not only deft in its writing and visual analysis, but this well-written book is itself a beautiful object.

--New Books in East Asian Studies (NBN)