A Fashionable Century Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing

Rachel Silberstein

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.

Silberstein cover

2020

  • $65.00 cloth, 9780295747187
  • $65.00 ebook, 978-0-2957-4719-4
  • 296 pages
  • 92 color illus., 7 x 10 in.

about the author

Rachel Silberstein is a lecturer in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. She is a historian of visual/material culture and gender in early modern China, with a particular interest in women’s engagement with fashion and textile handicrafts. She earned a DPhil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford (2014) and was previously ACLS / Henry Luce Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor at Rhode Island School of Design. 

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