Image found in "Shanghai Modern" by Lee Ou-fan, pg. 149
Original caption reads "Eileen Chang in a theatrical pose."
One of the most representative and arguably the best Chinese modernist writers was Eileen Chang whose fiction, essays, and screenplays captured the sophistication of old Shanghai and Hong Kong. Unfortunately, the continuing political upheavals that energized her career also extinguished it – her move to the United States and encounter with the provincialism of the American publishing industry left her with nowhere to let her talent shine. Her distinctive observations of Chinese society and her ability, in her Chinese language writing, to make a cutting remark in a way that made readers feel in on the joke, did not transition well to English, which she commanded fluently from a young age.
She died in obscurity in Los Angeles in the 1990s, hiding out in seedy West Hollywood apartment buildings like a faded film star. Her death was reported on by a Chinese professional journalist living in America who had made stalking Eileen Chang his pastime, digging into her trash can daily to look for discarded manuscripts. It was only the absence of her trash that led him to realize something was wrong, and he was the one who made the discovery that she had died.
Although Eileen Chang is most well-known for her novels and short stories, which depict a glamorous, yet everyday urbanity of the type extolled by Walter Benjamin, the defining voice of European modernity and Austro-Hungarian elegance, she was also a prolific contributor to magazines and newspapers, a vibrant print culture that literally shaped the image of Chinese modernity. More than Lu Xun (who is more like the grandfather of modernity), it is Eileen Chang’s impact that is still alive to this day in the elegant boredom of Asia’s trendy youth.
It is clear in her fiction, and her narrative tone of detached ironic description coupled with an intimate understanding of a city person’s lively internal world, that she was an astute social observer. As such, she developed her own theories on social trends and phenomena she witnessed on the streets of Shanghai. In an essay “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes” published in a translated collection entitled Written on Water, she comes up with a theory on the utility behind trends in fashion:
“In times of political turmoil and social unrest – the Renaissance in Europe, for instance – there will always be a preference for tight-fitting clothes, light and supple, allowing for quickness of movement. In fifteenth-century Italy, clothes were so tight that they had split seams at the elbows, knees, and other joints. During the days when the revolution in China was brewing, Chinese clothes were nearly bursting at the seams.”[1]
This same theory can be applied today globally, as fashion is not nearly so individual as it is made to seem. Rather, it is strictly bound culturally, and as Eileen Chang shows, it is influenced by the broader political situation. After having moved back to the United States from Taiwan last year, I was struck by the stark difference in fashion trends here and there. One day, while spacing out in a café in my hometown, it hit me full in the face: every young woman there was wearing tight-fitting exercise clothing. In a place like South Florida, these clothes seem to just make sense: they are comfortable, practical, lightweight, and flattering for many different body types. But in Taipei, which had a similar climate, the fashion was the polar opposite: lightweight materials but a lot of them. Long, wide-legged pants, oversized (寬版 kuan ban) long t-shirts, long buttoned shirts or robes to complete the ensemble, linen sack dresses, oversized vintage clothing culled off a barge sent to Thailand – everything used a maximum of fabric and covered the entire skin surface. In the summer heat, it offered protection against the sun and mosquitoes, and because it was loose and the material was lightweight, it was not as hot or heavy as someone from a cold climate may assume.
In South Florida, telling natives and tourists apart is simple. No matter the time of year, native kids wear tight jeans and hoodies. It is the tourists and foreign visitors who wear khaki Bermuda shorts, Hawaiian shirts, sundresses, and the like. In their twenties and thirties, men and women from the area start to favor athleisure wear. They like wearing tight clothing that gives them maximum mobility, clothing that doesn’t get in the way. Likely due to work in the restaurant and entertainment service industries that requires a lot of movement and flexibility, they tend to wear tight jeans, leggings, cleavage-baring shirts for the women and bicep-baring shirts for the men.
Eileen Chang attributed the whims of fashion to the overarching social situation. She lived in Shanghai and Hong Kong during the war, so she was drawing on personal experiences of war time versus peace time. But even without the presence of an overt war between rival nations, the situation on the street and out in public can be considered dangerous or peaceful.
East Asian countries, including Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, live under a constant, low-level threat of war. South Korea and Japan face continual actual military aggression from North Korea and near-aggression from China, and economic aggression toward and from each other. Taiwan’s situation is always popping up in the international news media as being one on the brink of war, although, from within, it never feels dire. They all also face internal untenable domestic issues with impossible housing markets, suppressed wages, heavy pollution, and more. Yet their street life is extremely peaceful. As with any place, there are still thefts, murders, car accidents, and various street crimes, yet their public life is wildly more peaceable than the public experience in North America and Europe. For this reason, East Asian tourists are often considered easy targets for robbery when they go on tours in European capitals, because they are often blissfully naïve of the level of street crime that Europeans and Americans have learned to live with. The peace in which they live their day-to-day lives, according to Eileen Chang’s theory, has translated into their fashion choices, in which they favor loose, flowing clothing.
On the other hand, Americans are crazy for athleisure wear, a trend that has been going strong for years now. They like to wear it bare, with tight shirts, gym shorts over leggings and sneakers for men, sports bras with leggings and sneakers for women. A small cross body bag or fanny pack, something that doesn’t get in the way, maybe a baseball cap. If you live in the US, you see this outfit constantly, you’re haunted by it. The United States is constantly at war, yet never within their own borders. Only the most hardcore among Americans fears an attack on the country from an external power, although the news likes to hang the threat of nuclear attack from Russia over our heads (a throwback from the heyday of the Cold War when papers actually sold). However, Euro-American street life is not the picnic that it is in Asia. Women are cautious about walking alone at night or being alone out in certain public places in general. Sensational stories abound of victimized and assaulted women have the cumulative effect of scaring women away from public spaces, and the stories about police brutality or neighborhood shootings often have the same unwelcoming effect.
Obsession with fashion, especially what is known as streetwear in the US (but which refers mainly to athletic clothing), is often poked fun at due to the intensity of its following. One interesting feature of the more present-day obsession with streetwear is the gender of its following. Obsession with fashion and clothes to a high degree, thought for so long to be a feminine trait, has been revealed to have its masculine side. “Love me, love my shoes.” We imagine this phrase to be uttered by a high femme-type with a thousand pairs of high-heels, but it could just as well be expressed by the man with a hundred pairs of sneakers. But no matter the era, so many mental resources trained on following the vagaries of fashion comes off as wasteful:
“Quick alterations in style do not necessarily indicate mental fluidity or a readiness to adopt new ideas. On the contrary. They may reveal instead a generalized apathy, for frustration in other fields may lead to the forced flow of intellectual and artistic energy into the domain of fashion. In a time of political chaos, people were powerless to improve the external conditions governing their lives. But they could influence the environment immediately surrounding them, that is, their clothes.”[2]
Even more so, considering the well-documented environmental impact of the fast fashion industry:
“In the past, women’s clothes, like jewelry could always be sold for ready cash, but in the Republican era, pawn shops no longer accepted them, because once they went out of fashion, they were worthless.”[3]
But is a pithy observation about fashion trends truly significant? In recent months (more than a year, really), the US has seen the loose-fitting clothing trend from Asia migrate over. Although most Americans are unaware of the origins (they see it purely as a Y2K fashion revival), the fact is that their clothing is produced mainly in Asia. Rather than the Euro-American markets dictating trends that Asian factories produce, and then buying up the counterfeits for themselves (Converse sneakers and Fjallraven backpacks made after-hours and sold on the street or in famous knock-off markets such as Hong Kong’s Ladies Market), bargain-hunting and novelty-seeking young Americans are now primarily buying clothing produced for the Asian market. While this started long ago with the rise (and fall) of Forever 21, which captured clothes meant for the South Korean clothing markets and brought them to America, after it toppled, it was supplanted by Shein, a Chinese company which does exactly the same.
More discerning and wealthier fashionable youth are introduced to these trends through well-advertised fashion house collaborations. A Taiwanese select shop from Taichung teamed up with a few international brands and was introduced to the Euro-American market, which then proceeded to rip off its style.
So we have cycled around. The lament over fast fashion is not purely environmentally motivated; it is the Euro-dominated fashion industry’s response to an external threat. East Asia has gone back to dictating the trends, not only for its own markets, but largely for the global market. The quest for cloth which led to the European Age of Exploration which wanted to get access to the prosperity of the Ming’s commercial empire now sees itself fighting from the outside again. But maybe this can finally free us from the overly strict dictates of Fashion, the Industry:
“Fashion in China is not an organized, planned business venture. There are no great fashion houses like Lelong’s and Shiaparelli’s in Paris that monopolize the market and exert influence throughout the world of white people. Our tailors lack initiative on their own and can only follow the vast, unaccountable waves of communal fancy that make themselves manifest from time to time. And it is for this reason that Chinese fashions can be more reliably read as representing the will of the people.”[4]
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