Reviewing Nancy Duong’s Fashion Timeline of Chinese Clothing
If you like historical Chinese clothing and have an internet connection chances are you have seen these drawings. They have been spread around so much but for some reason I was only able to find out the author yesterday (at time of writing), Nancy Duong from @nannaia. Her website is nancyduong.com. These drawings are so iconic and famous but I don’t really see anybody talking about their accuracy? So I thought it’d be fun to review the drawings as well as the sources used. Ok clickbaity title here, I’m only going to talk about the segments on Ming, Qing and republican era because I know nothing about the others.
Quick disclaimer: none of what I am going to say is a criticism of the artist or her research abilities, as we will see Duong obviously put a lot of efforts into the research and this project was absolutely epic; this will just be a nitpicky review of some of the details which I hope some of you will find useful or enlightening. Also the fact that this was made in 2013 still blows my mind, like I was still a wee child then.
Without further ado, let’s get into it.
*I’m not yet so familiar with the minutiae of Ming fashion so if anything I say is whack feel free to correct me.
I’ll begin with Fig 12 which is the beginning of the Ming Dynasty. This doesn’t really look like what we think of as early Ming fashion nowadays because I think the reference material she used was likely a 仕女画 shinvhua, a genre of literati painting that featured highly stylized female figures in historicist clothing. The costumes were meant to be excessively flowing and adhering to people’s imaginations of deities or historical figures, meaning that they had little to no connection to what was actually popular in real life. This is a very common misunderstanding for earlier scholars of Chinese fashion history, they just weren’t aware that 仕女画 were not realistic. In her post, Duong mentioned that one of the books she consulted was 5000 Years of Chinese Costume published in 1987, which is very dated and kind of notorious for using a lot of non realistic art as reference for real fashion… In recent years there has been more awareness about what paintings could be used for research and what could not, but in 2013 that was probably too much to ask. So this is more of a sign of the times.
Ming Dynasty shinvhua by 仇英 Qiu Ying (1492-1552), a renowned painter. For some reason the costumes in most shinvhua feature an apron of some kind tied to the waist and a 披帛 pibo or shawl, perhaps it was a reference to Tang Dynasty fashion. If you see a painting from the Ming Dynasty or later featuring women wearing an apron and a shawl, it’s a huge red flag that the clothing is not realistic. From the Ming Dynasty onward, women wore robes outside of skirts, meaning the waistband shouldn’t really be visible.
Closeup of 真武灵应图册, presumably made in the early 15th century, showing the more realistic way of dressing for women in the early Ming.
The other thing here is the caption “restoration of native rule, Yuan customs are abolished”. While that is true on paper, in practice early Ming fashion was full of leftovers from the Yuan Dynasty. A popular decoration style was 织金锦 zhijinjin or gold brocade, a textile manufacturing technique presumably of Persian origin that was immensely popular among the Mongols. I can understand why the first emperor of the Ming would advertise himself as the restorer of Han customs for legitimacy and power, but personally he was a huge fan of gold brocade too ;)
Fig 13 is probably traced from this painting below, which is very legit. The only minor qualm is that Duong seems to have added two 裙襕 qunlan or decorative horizontal strips to the skirt, which are not present in the painting itself. This style of qunlan was common in the early Ming (you can see it in the previous painting) but I’m not sure if it would be acceptable on this particular outfit.
Fig 14 is where it gets interesting and where my niche area of expertise comes in. Duong didn’t specify which part of the Ming Dynasty each outfit was from, but there is at least a 200 year gap between fig 13 and 14, because fig 14 is from the Qing Dynasty… I mentioned this in my review of Evolution & Revolution, I’ll just repeat here. A lot of early historians bought into the rhetoric that the “late Ming aesthetic” continued into the Qing for a couple of years before being obliterated by a mystical form of Manchu inspired dress (something that looks like fig 15 probably). In reality though, that so called “late Ming aesthetic” persisted well into the 18th century until the Jiaqing era when it began to be replaced by a new style, which also wasn’t the stereotypical Qing Dynasty outfit; that didn’t solidify into a thing until the 1840s, at which point the Qing was seven decades away from death. Because of this, fashion from the 18th century often gets mislabeled as Ming. It could be potentially considered hanfu but it’s definitely not Ming… I feel like 17th and 18th century clothing represent the Qing as much as the 19th century does, the Qing is not just the 19th century.
Fig 14 specifically reads very much as Yongzheng era (1720s), with the back heavy hairstyle, tight fitting 披风 pifeng, robe with standing collar and the white skirt. This confusion really isn’t Duong’s fault but more of the book’s. If I analyzed this as Yongzheng era fashion, it would be pretty accurate with the only problems being the sleeve length and button placement. The sleeves are way too short for that era. Before 挽袖 wanxiu or folded cuffs became a thing in the Qianlong era, the sleeves of most Chinese historical clothing were made longer than the wearer’s arms, meaning they had to grab the cuffs to use their hands, creating very beautiful folds and creases when doing that. Also the sleeves commonly had a decorative border similar to that at the collar. The lower button was usually placed at the very bottom of the collar because that would actually connect the collar and the neck area. You see what I mean in the below image.
A painting from the series 雍亲王十二美人图, made in the 1710s/20s. These paintings are full of mysteries and we aren’t even sure who the women (or woman) portrayed really were, but they did depict Han aristocratic women’s fashion realistically. Some of the details resemble late Ming fashion, such as the metal buttons, soft standing collar and parallel collar pifeng, but this is undeniably Qing.
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