Two pieces of food for thought:
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https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3198984/china-chic-trend-builds-young-peoples-patriotism-cultural-confidence (Chinese people starting to dress in the Han fashion again)
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https://web.archive.org/web/20210210074724/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/10/world/asia/new-zealand-rawiri-waititi-tie.html (Māori politician kicked out of parliament for not wearing a necktie, turns into a whole dispute, eventually wins)
Now if you look at Chinese parliament, well I don't have to tell you what you'll see.
What would it take for Chinese politicians to start appearing in Han dress?
(not advocating for this, just a stray thought I had)
For Han dress specifically, a founding pillar of the CPC is their opposition to Han chauvinism and inclusivity towards national minorities. As ethnocentric attitudes remain all-too-common in China , something which Xi himself has repeatedly stated to be an enduring problem , there's been a persistent opposition -from party leadership and intellectual circles- to the use of official dress that can be construed as endorsing Han-centric attitudes.
This made me imagine a People's Assembly where everyone wears their own region's traditional dress.
I mean, that would be the ideal situation in any plurinational government. The sooner we can kiss colonial, eurocentric dress codes the better.
And this is coming from someone who loves wearing suits.
Modi, MBS, and several African leaders already wear their traditional outfits. In china the mao suit is usually only for ceremonies or state visits. There’s not really any modern Chinese alternatives, and I’m not sure if the CPC wants their leaders wearing imperial era clothing lol
They’ll have to gradually modify the mao suit and wear it more, or just straight use the Mao suit for modern life lol. Though it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of western suits. I just can’t imagine a world where everyone looks like :mao-wave: while on a fancy dinner date
In storage I have a real Mao suit. I was in China and asked one of the girls where I could find one. The next time I saw her, to my surprise, she had two of them. In an even bigger surprise, one of them actually fit me.
They were 100% authentic, she said they were her grandfather's and he didn't wear them any more. There were no tags or care markings on them.
I have to dig it out next time I'm at my Mom's house.
Sharp, modern, solid symbolism. A good suit for all of China.
It also just looks better than western suits imo.
How practical is the suit? Western suits have a bunch of fake pockets that do absolutely nothing as well as additional pieces of garment for "formality" like handkerchiefs and cuffs. But the Mao suits look like everything you see is everything you get and there's no additional pieces to add to it
The pockets are real, but usually sewn shut as it looks better. The first thing I do with a new suit coat is get a thread ripper and open all the pockets. I can't stand sewn up pockets.
the problem of 'traditional dress' in class societies is you're inevitably dressing as the aristocrats who shackled your great-great-great grandparents
like sure Ming mandarins were drippy as fuck, and confucian top-knots look very cool but either looking like a servant of the emperor or an adherent of the patriarchal tradition is not something a representative of an egalitarian party should be doing in an official capacity. this is why zhongshan suits and short hair were adopted
if this feels like a chauvinistic position i'll remind you western liberal government officials also do not wear 'traditional' dress. the common ancestor of european formal wear is based squarely in the styles developed during the French Revolution. though recuperated & much elaborated on in the following centuries, the western business suit (that name's very much a reminder of the kind of class society we're under lol) is the consciously created revolutionary garb of the ascendant bourgeois---the real chauvinism is how western communists failed to bring a new style into being to inaugurate socialist revolution SMDH Stalin ya shudda brought back skirts or something
Western communists arguably brought in military chich (certainly Latin communists)
the real chauvinism is how western communists failed to bring a new style into being to inaugurate socialist revolution SMDH Stalin ya shudda brought back skirts or something
How would you go about doing this today? Assuming you get a revolution going and take over a country. What approach would you take to abolishing the use of suits given its existing normalisation and establishing something else?
a) iterating on a particularly revolutionary group of peoples existing style---sans culottes made everyone stop wearing culottes through imitation---so like paris commune 2 a bunch of people dress like firemen after they were the ones who broke down the gates of parliament or something.
b) ostentatious state experimentation, the funniest thing about weird and innovative styles from the 1790s-1814 is that more often than not they were dreamt up by some committee and forced officials to wear them, gaze upon these silly bastards
yeah that is the difficult question the cultural revolution was to answer: a lot of the symbolism of ancient china is symbolism of the class dominion of the rulers.
I like to think of it as analoguous of when I used to live in the shadow of a castle. The castle might be my cultural heritage but it is a heritage of being an owned thing a serf and I want to escape that heritage. So I don't consider the historical art of my culture anything more than a shackle my ancestors had to wear
I think if it does happen they probably won't wear the traditional dress from 100 years ago anymore than americans would dress like puritans
China might have a fashion movement based around traditional styles but no way are they going to all start dressing like their great grandparents
It would be cool if it could be disentangled from the legacy of Imperial China and Han chauvinism - although I think I would prefer evolving the modern suit into something better than returning to older styles.
Always worth noting how bland and basic American styles of apparel tend to be. Any effort to add color or pattern or panache to an outfit gets razzed out of style by the same people who freak out over a woman with pink hair. Chinese styles of dress are so wildly anathema to the western puritanical look that they can only really gain traction in a country absent that toxic misogynist social setting.
I imagine we'd start seeing politicians adopt the style in areas where western business interests have the least impact and spreading outward from there. Not really expecting it in Hong Kong or Shanghai any time soon. But I guess we'll see.
The Chinese call American/western style 土, roughly pronounced tŭ I haven't been keeping up enough with c/Lang to know the full context. But it roughly means dirt. So it'd mean some like "dust level drip"
"Tu" means earth. Western dress is 西装, "western costume". It used to be quite fashionable in the post-Qing era. It showed you weren't a slave to tradition like so many others, and were forward-looking and progressive.
My ability to follow chinese memes is a little slow bit it had been the insult to describe western fashion for a while. If they changed it I hadn't seen anything on doyen
Nah.
Instead, for masculine clothing, do what a lot of Iranian men do and get rid of folded collar and neckties.
Edit: like (most of) these gents
Counterpoint: chixiao mao (鴟鴞帽, "owl hat"):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/%E9%B4%9F%E9%B4%9E%E5%B8%BD2.jpg:owl-wink: :mao-clap:
I just want us to abolish the suit and tie already it's boring
I want our next President to dress properly :large-adult-son:
I think it's a bad idea to just move from one uniform of the ruling class to a different uniform (of a different ruling class population) but I think the range of things you're "allowed" to wear in a formal setting should be expanded for sure. If the uniform has to be ruling class uniforms then I don't see why you shouldn't see guys in suits sitting next to guys in traditional chinese garb, according to their own preference.
But really we should probably try to communicate something new with our choice of clothing.
uniform of the ruling class
I guess one advantage of the European suit is that it's so ubiquitous that it doesn't really scan as a uniform of the ruling class anymore. Like back in the day monarchs would ban the color purple and say that the only one allowed to wear it was them, but now we all wear the exact same shit and the people who claim to be able to tell the difference between an expensive one and a cheap one are liars on the level of wine enthusiasts.
But now that I think about it
from another point of view, the European suit isn't so much the uniform of a ruling class that has had its meaning diluted with time - it's actually the proscribed uniform of everyone who participates in capitalism. The real "ruler" of our society has long been the algorithm, and the truth is that nobody has the right to wear what they want anymore because the algorithm demands that we wear its colors: black with a white undershirt.
Oh, I assure you it's not hard to tell a tailored suit from an off-the-rack one. You just have to see if it fits correctly or not. Then you look at the fabric, etc. I find a helpful shortcut is to look at the shoes. Well-off people don't buy shoes from Foot Locker, they have cobblers.
Tailoring I agree, but getting something tailored is relatively cheap (and can be done yourself if you know basic sewing) and makes your look 1000% better no matter what you're wearing.
I'm talking about knowing the difference between a suit that was bought at Sears and one bought at a high end exclusive executive suit shop. If you can't see the tag, a suit is a suit.
In the same way that any body located on a beach is a beach body, any style of clothing worn by a Chinese person is Chinese dress.
Not Chinese dress. Hanfu.
Every ethnicity in China has its own traditional clothing. Hanfu is the clothing of the Han, who are the overwhelming majority in China. Usually nobody wears it unless it's a photo session for a wedding or a tea ceremony or some shit. There are a few weirdos who wear it every day, it's called the "hanfu movement" and it's mostly died out by a few years ago.
I understand this, my point is that people can wear whatever they want, I have no opinions or say on the matter, and pass no judgement.
Even if it's ethno-nationalist? By the majority population that overwhelmingly dominates the minorities? I think there's room to be a bit judgy there.
