Fashion and time in China's Twentieth Century

Abstract

The chapter explores the relationship between fashion and time in the history of twentieth-century China. The simplest construction of this relationship is visible in everyday English expressions such as up-to-date or dated. Comparably, ‘time’ (shi) is embedded in Chinese expressions for fashion and fashionable (shizhuang, shimao, shishang). Based on empirical research while drawing for its analysis on the work by historians of China and theorists of fashion, the chapter shows that in the first half of the twentieth century, fashion was visibly implicated in the reconstruction of China’s historical time. A nexus was established between clothing as cultural expression and the historical tem..