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19+ - she/her - i just like looking at pretty things Link to Overall Masterlist

[darkeningclouds]

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[hanfugallery]

Chinese hanfu in Sui dynasty style by 璇玑

[itsmarjudgelove]

[yingtan]

The Double 墨雨云间 (2024), directed by Lu Hao Jiji, Bai Yunmo & Ma Shige costume design by Song Xiaotao, hair and make-up designed by Lin Anqi

[lolita-wardrobe]

That's right! I'm both the prince and the princess!

◆ Outfits >>> https://lolitawardrobe.com/evegie-baroness-ravenna-gothic-lolita-ouji-vest-cape-skirt-and-pants-thin-version_p8811.html

[melonatures]

From now on, we'll live and die together.

[dommingateez]

me when i first started watching cdramas: woah the sets are so beautiful

me watching cdramas now: hey, i know that street. hey, i know that temple. hey, i know that courtyard. hey, i know that gate. hey, i know that tree

[zhoudadudugongjin]

Someone pitch a c drama where the plot is just that two producers double booked hengdian studios for their new high budget wuxia dramas and now they're fighting over the sets

[heymeowmao]

三生无殇 | Beloved of a Lifetime ° wedding outfits✧˖°

[mostlyfate]

Kill Me Love Me 春花焰 · 2024

[donttakemehome]

How to tell if you're in a historical Chinese drama:

(Inspired by this classic!)

Someone offends you unforgivably by calling you by your actual name.

You are preparing for a bloody battle in the rain. Your boots are made of exquisitely embroidered silk duchesse.

Everyone you know is god-tier beautiful. You ignore this.

Significant tea is being poured.

Your soulmate tells you in plain words that they love you. You comically misunderstand what they said, and will keep doing so, because the plot is not over yet.

The only thing more elaborate than the villain's cunning plan is the engineering of your man-bun.

Duels are scored like gymnastics routines. To beat your opponent, try a triple-twisting double tucked salto.

You have been married for thirty years. You have never seen your spouse's wrist.

Sometimes peasants and servants are killed horribly in front of you. It's a normal part of life. The other peasants will presumably take care of the practicalities, such as burial and being upset.

Any injury, including a broken nail, makes you vomit blood.

The year is 400 AD. French tips have been invented.

You're on a moon bridge and you are yearning.

[seasealwaters]

Dude you forgot falling off the cliff at 0.25 speed. That's like the most important one

[fake-married-my-dead-fiance]

You are poisoned, but it's not that concerning. You've been poisoned before. It's weirder when you're not poisoned.

[tavina-writes]

you are a woman who has rescued a random animal and/or wounded man by the side of the road. twelve episodes later you jump off a building without your eyeballs.

your father died under mysterious circumstances shortly before or after you were born. you are going to grow up to avenge his death and leave behind a trail of corpses. At the end of it you have to reckon with if your father was worth this sort of thing yknow?

you are a random peasant who has been framed for a hideous crime. you will die for the plot.

you are CERTAIN your husband loves you most. So are his 67 other concubines. You will kill a baby over this.

you will keep pouring wine-water all over your face and your clothes. some of it might even end up in your mouth. you realize this is main character actions. you cannot stop.

[ariaste]

A markedly-less-than-ethereally-beautiful man is shouting at you in a teahouse, revealing himself to be something of an uncultured bumpkin. You maintain your poise and composure, sip your tea, and quote a single devastating line of poetry. The bumpkin physically falls over into the crowd of henchmen standing just beside him. Yes, like dominoes. The teahouse owner comps your meal and cries on your feet in gratitude. Oh, they were the local gang? Ok.

Someone has written a devastating line of poetry on a fan. The heartbreak. The bittersweetness. The poignancy.

If you are scheduled to yearn but somehow cannot source a convenient moon bridge, the moon itself will do. Failing that, perhaps a porch with a stand of bamboo and some snow flurries?

Staring too hard into your soulmate's eyes is literally the same thing as kissing them wet and sloppy with tongue. If you also smile at each other, that is the same as going to second base.

[fouryearsofshades]

I had been thinking about making this post but only have time during the new year holiday. I am always so late in reporting the latest hanfu trend.

[peekofhistory]

(Don't let the semi-nude man scare you, he gets dressed 😅) Layers of men's Ming Dynasty work wear for court. The different colours depict different ranks in position.

Src: 夏友宝

http://xhslink.com/a/Sy7bpWh7VoF4

[hanfugallery]

chinese hanfu models on xhs

[redsugarx]

Hanfu in Components: Structure Conventions (pt2)

Thanks for the love on the last post, I’ve been motivated to continue writing LOL Anyway: Construction/sewing pattern/structure is very important to hanfu!

There are a few important structure conventions when it comes to hanfu—almost all traditional-cut hanfu follow these rules; you could call them the defining characteristics of hanfu. There are exceptions to every rule of course (I will go over some caveats at the end of this post), but generally if a hanfu design ignores these rules we might consider it to be ‘incorrect.'

(There will be a longer follow-up pt. 3 post to this explaining the anatomy of a hanfu top/robe, where there will be more detailed in-context illustrations and descriptions. I just figured I should list these ‘rules’ somewhere separately.)

中縫/中缝/zhong1 feng4/Center Seam

Take a look at your shirts. Is there a shoulder seam between the front of the shirt and the back of the shirt? Western clothing tends to consist of a front piece + back piece sewn together to create a space for your body to sit in：

Hanfu doesn’t work like that. Traditionally, the garment isn’t separated into a front piece and back piece: it’s separated into a right piece and left piece, which are joined together at the vertical center seam. Why? Traditional fabric has a narrower width than the standard ~145cm that we have today, so a long, narrow piece is less wasteful to cut out from a bolt of silk than a wide one.

Therefore there is always a center seam, one running vertically down the front and one down the back. 中 = center, 縫 = seam, so 中縫 means center seam. There’ll be a front center seam （前中縫） and a back center seam （後中縫）.

不破肩/不破肩/bu2 po4 jian1/No Broken Shoulder

Kind of an addendum onto the previous point? Additionally since the body pieces are separated into left/right rather front/back, there’s no seam at the top of the shoulder here. The fabric is simply draped over the arm/shoulder to hang down, covering the torso on both sides.*

*Caveat: Some modified hanfu that vendors sell today will have a shoulder seam, especially thicker winter garments or short-sleeved garments. This is a design choice made to prevent the fabric from looking too stiff, known as 破肩/破肩/po4 jian1，literally “broken shoulder.” It can look great, lots of hanfu makers do it! But just to be clear, that is a MODIFICATION.

接袖/接袖/jie1 xiu4/Sleeve Connection

Western clothing patterns tend to have something where the fabric of the sleeve gets connected to the fabric of the garment’s body at the shoulder/armpit, often with a concave arm hole shape to help with the contours of the garment when it’s worn.

Hanfu sleeves, on the other hand, are never connected at the armpit—they are connected halfway down the arm. In other words, the piece of fabric that forms the body extends to also cover the upper arm part of the sleeve. The actual sleeve piece is connected to the body at the bicep/elbow area via a flat seam. (In the case of half- or no- sleeve garments there might just not be a separate sleeve piece.)

右衽/右衽/you4 ren4/"Right Over Left" Rule

Applies to cross-collar, some varieties of round collar, and some varieties of standing collar tops. In the case that the front of the garment crosses over itself, the flap coming from the wearer’s left goes OVER the flap coming from the wearer’s right. Easiest way to make sense of this is, if you’re looking at someone wearing a cross-collar hanfu top, the cross will look like a lowercase y.

Caveats

NO RULE EXISTS WITHOUT EXCEPTION!!! These rules exist because a majority of hanfu follow them and they are a standard that people agree on right now. However, there are ALWAYS cases—historically or otherwise—where these rules may be broken. For example, there are several Ming Dynasty cross collar robes that happen to be left over right, and the location of the sleeve seam can differ based on what garment you're looking at.

Also, many modern hanfu manufacturers will deliberately choose to break these 'rules' in favor of aesthetics. This is a purposeful design choice—not one that's done out of ignorance or disrespect. It's easy for common modifications to get mistaken for 'historically accurate.' To be clear, it is 100% okay and super common for modifications to exist! Just don't go around claiming that it was historically that way.

My advice is that if you're starting out with hanfu, try to stick to these rules in the back of your head as closely as possible. Once you've built your foundational knowledge, then you can start exploring the exceptions to the rules. These rules may not be foolproof, but they are a useful tool to help you understand the commonalities and trends within hanfu without overwhelming you.

Last note: it is generally more of a taboo for seams that should exist to not exist in a piece of clothing (i.e. no center back seam) than for extra seams to exist. If you go look in museums for the artifacts that hanfu is based off of, you'll notice that a lot of them—especially the ones from earlier dynasties—are a chaotic patchwork of a bunch of random piece of fabric sewn together to create the garment. Fabric is expensive, people don't want to waste it! So it's not all that weird to have seams in random places.

Happy 除夕 everyone! 有蛇有得 :>

[peekofhistory]

Hanfu + modern dancing = ?? 🤭🤭

Happy Spring Festival everyone! May the year of the Snake bring you health, prosperity, peace, and joy! 祝你。。。 天上掉红包， 桌上冒饺子， 出门晴天不堵车， 在家吃喝天天乐！

Wishing you... Red envelopes fall from the sky Dumplings appear on the table Going out is sunny and no traffic jam At home eat, drink, everyday happy!

Vid src: 我是411 【礼崩乐坏 陶俑蹦迪 大唐disco】

https://b23.tv/3ZxI3o1

[peekofhistory]

The "friendly" debates of some Ming court advisors 🤪

Sometimes I get an image that people of the past were always serious, stern, no-nonsense, but I'm sure they also experienced the full spectrum of human emotions, 喜怒哀乐，悲欢离合 (happiness, anger, sorrow, enjoyment, sadness, joy, separation, meeting).

Src: 四序国风美学 【大明文官武官的友好日常】 https://b23.tv/1GViust (BGM music added by me)

[redsugarx]

Hanfu in Components: Hanfu Anatomy, Tops (pt 3.1)

Now that you know about the names of different garments, what about the parts of each garment? There are so many confusing terms!!! I gotchu :>

When looking at hanfu and parts of hanfu, it can help to see how the garment is constructed. To do that, we have to look at the pattern of the garment. Sewing patterns are the templates that tell sewists how to cut their fabric into the shapes that are needed to make their clothes. Hanfu sewing patterns are fairly standard. They look roughly like this.

(blue = shoulder fold line // red = center front // green = center back)

To help you understand how this all comes together, when defining different parts of hanfu anatomy, I'll show it on the sketch above, and also on photos of people wearing hanfu, highlighted in green.

身/SHEN1/BODY

This refers to the body of the garment—the part that would cover your torso. Typically there are two pieces of cloth making up the body: one on the left and one on the right.

Once again, one of hanfu’s main defining characteristics is that traditionally, THE SAME PIECE OF FABRIC MAKES UP THE FRONT AND THE BACK. There is no shoulder seam separating the front and back of the garment.

袖/XIU4/SLEEVE

袖 means sleeve (in both technical and colloquial terms). There are many shapes that the sleeve can take: they can be narrow like normal clothing or they can be big and dramatic like the kind you see in cdramas. Like the body, there is no seam separating the front and back of the sleeve—the sleeve piece is draped over the arm and sewn together at the bottom. Another important characteristic is that the sleeves are joined to the body at the bicep or elbow area, NOT at the shoulder. (Short or half-sleeve tops might not have a separate sleeve piece.)

領/领/LING3/COLLAR

領 means collar (in both technical and colloquial terms). This can refer to two things: one, the general shape of the neck area (round, square, standing, cross etc.) and the actual strip of fabric that is attached at the neck to form the collar.

襟//JIN4/LAPEL

This can be translated as collar or lapel; I choose to say lapel to distinguish it from 領. This refers to the area where an open-front top would open. It’ll look different based on the collar type—generally a 對襟/对襟/dui4 jin4/parallel collar top’s jin coincides with the front centerline.

With a 交領/交领/jiao1 ling3/cross-collar top, however, it would coincide with the outer edge of the collar. (Will have a more detailed post about this later.)

下擺/下摆/XIA4 BAI3/HEMLINE

Refers to the bottom hem of the garment. 下 means down/bottom. Note that 擺 can refer to different things in different contexts. If you see someone talk about the 下擺 of a top, they’re talking about this bit.

The following terms only apply to a subsection of hanfu tops and may have fewer images as a result.

衽/REN4/LAPEL EXTENSION

This one is a little harder to translate. Applies to non-parallel lapel tops like cross collar, diagonal-lapel standing collar, and overlapping round collar garments. It’s an extension of the BODY piece on the front, sewn to the vertical center front seam, that overlaps over the other side. (Will have a more detailed post about this later.)

衩/CHA4/VENT

Also called vents or slits—an optional open slit, usually made on each side of a longer shirt or robe, to allow for ease of movement. Might be combined with the word 開/开/kai1/open to form the phrase 開衩/开衩/kai1 cha4/open slit. Mostly applies to longer robes or tops, where the length reaches the knee, so that you don’t have issues with walking.

襴/LAN2/WAIST EXTENSION

Also a little harder to translate. This only applies to 襦/ru2/Ru tops and 襴衫/襕衫/lan2 shan1/Lanshan robes, plus some varieties that were derived off of those two. The 襴/襕/lan2 is an extra rectangle of fabric appended to the bottom of a shirt/top to extend its length. It can be made of a contrasting fabric or the same fabric, and often has pleats on the sides to allow for movement. (Will have a more detailed post about this later.)

緣/缘/YUAN2/TRIM

Refers to the trim or decorative contrasting bits on a piece of clothing. Specific location goes in front of the character. For example, 袖缘 means sleeve trim, aka the cuff. Some specific trims might have their own special names but that’s for another post.

Later post about skirts/pants to come soon!