I hate Sabine. You think her ass being a walking stereotypes would at least mean Marinette more connected to her Chinese culture. Nah, got the white boy teaching her mandarin instead.
Can't even wear a clothes properly. Why tf does she wear it right over left instead another way around. Got a death wish or something?
This also apply to Tomoe btw. The proper way to wear kimono and qipao is left over right . Right over left is reserved for the dead. It takes one google search to stop these woman dressing up like a corpse.
And no, I don't think Sabine mean to be minority ethnic from heibei where dressing up that way is acceptable. And even if writers want to be save their ass and said she is, Tomoe should still not wearing her kimono like that.
Quick disclaimer: I don't mind when asks are a little character salty, but I try to avoid this level of character salt on the blog for a myriad of reasons. The big one is that I like to focus on the people behind the curtains and not the puppets they're controlling. It feels weird to rant about a fictional character's outfit and not the designers who put her in it. However, these are fictional characters whose feelings can't be hurt and this wasn't general salt. It was a specific topic I found quite interesting so I decided to answer it anyway.
Before this ask, I knew nothing about qipaos or kimonos. I've now done some research and have enough knowledge for us to learn some basics about Chinese and Japanese fashion.
I spent a few hours researching qipaos and I couldn't find anything to back the idea that Sabine's style was officially reserved for the dead (more on that later). All I was able to verify is that her qipao is a mirror of the traditional design as this image shows:
[Image description: an picture of Sabine Cheng next to a group of 16 women in qipaos. You cannot see the closure of every qipao, but every one you can see closes on the right while Sabine's closes on the left.]
Qipaos closing on the right is not just a minor trend. It is the traditional way they're supposed to look. Wikipedia even defines the outfit's appearance as having a "youren opening" which means "garments which overlap at the front and close to the wearer's right side":
The [qipao] is most often seen as a longer, figure-fitting, one piece garment with a standing collar, an asymmetric, left-over-right (youren) opening and two side slits, and embellished with Chinese frog fasteners on the lapel and the collar.
This blog about qipao shows all the ways qipaos are traditionally styled and none of the images match Sabine's design, though the blog does note that a right closing exists without any warnings about it being reserved for funeral wear:
Single sided fronts can be placed on either side of the dress, called the right-opened front piece (右开襟) or left-opened front piece (左开襟), although the right is by far the most common.
Wikipedia is similarly devoid of mentions of funeral attire.
I tried to find something that confirmed the funeral tradition thing using both "qipao" and "cheongsam" (the other name for a qipao), but read several articles and I found nothing. These dresses are relatively modern - having roots in traditional clothing, but only coming into existence in the late 1910s - and there are rules around the closure style for more traditional clothing, so the ask is probably referring to these rules even though they don't appear to officially extend to qipaos.
Is that a fair thing to do? As best I can tell, it's complicated.
To verify my assumption that the ask was referring to traditional clothing, I broadened my search to anything related to Chinese fashion. That lead me to this article talking about a minor scandal where a Chinese news anchor wore a shirt that closed on her left instead of her right leading to a flurry of social media commentary that she was wearing it wrong. Her shirt was not traditional clothing, but it still upset people, so the idea that Sabine's style would offend a Chinese person is not unfounded. At the same time, the news anchor was fine going on the air looking like that and no one in the studio stopped her, which indicates that this is not a massive social faux pas.
I couldn't find anything else on the incident or the topic in general so take that article with a grain of salt. I'd probably find more if I could search the Chinese part of the internet, but I don't speak Chinese so this is all I've got so let's move on to Kimonos whose traditions were extremely easy to verify.
If you look up a guide for how to wear a kimono, one of the first things you'll learn is that you ALWAYS close your kimono so the left side is over the right side:
For both the nagajuban (kimono underwear) and the kimono there is one important rule. Always wear the left side over the right side. Only dead people have their kimono worn right over left. So unless you are at your own funeral, remember this basic but important rule for wearing a kimono!
As a rule, the left collar of the Kimono should always be over the right side from your sight. Otherwise, you are making the most crucial mistake, a wrong way round called Hidarimae (左前, left side on top) only for those who [are] deceased.
In order to tie your kimono (or yukata) in a correct way, make sure to wrap the left side over the right one. Remember, not to cross your kimono round, because it is done in Japan for those who have passed away, if the kimono is closed with its right side over the left it symbolizes death which is a big mistake.
As the ask said, Tomoe's design ignores this rule and has her in the kimono of a dead woman:
[Image description: On the left we see Tomoe Tsurugi shown from the waist up. Her outfit is fashioned so that the right side closes over left side, a style reserved for the dead. On the right we see a woman in a kimono. Her kimono is fashioned so that the left side closes over right side, the style worn by the living. (Source for second image)]
The ease with which I found this rule is why I'm so confident that there's not a similar rule for qipaos. I found a ton of articles on their history, where to wear them, and the meanings of their various colors, but there was nothing on funerary traditions. I was even able to find a few images of women wearing qipaos that close the way Sabine's does. Meanwhile every guide on kimonos calls out the funeral thing and every image I saw had people wearing them the proper way.
Even if there aren't official funerary traditions surrounding qipao, it's still fair to ask why Miraculous has Sabine in a non-traditional style. This is extra true since Qilin indicated that Sabine follows a lot of Chinese traditions which makes her more likely to be the kind of person who sticks to traditional styles even when wearing modern clothing. So why isn't her clothing traditional? Where did this non traditional design even come from? A quick google of qipao gets you a ton of images and you have to dig to find one that closes on the left. My image search showed me 29 women in qipaos without scrolling and 28 of the 29 had the traditional style. The only one that was in a non-traditional style was the final one in the list:
[Image description: google image search results showing 29 images of women in qipao]
Was Sabine's outfit drawn from memory with zero research or reference images? What is happening here? Based on my research, I hesitate to call it insulting, but it is weird and sloppy. This show is supposed to be about two fashion designers! Why does it feel like I've done more research on fashion than the people running the show?
Tomoe's design - on the other hand - is insulting. It was already questionable even without the improper closing, the closing thing just takes it to a new height of insult. She's a modern business woman, not a Shinto Miko (Shinto shrine maidens), why is she wearing an outfit that's very clearly inspired by the traditional outfits reserved for Shinto Miko? This is not what Japanese business women look like! It's not even what kimonos look like since the outfits worn by Mikos are not kimonos. Every image I could find showed their closing style matching the style followed by kimono and my research indicates that the closing rule extends to all traditional clothing in Japan, so I feel comfortable saying that Tomoe's outfit should not close the way it does even if it's not technically a kimono. I also feel comfortable saying that she should be in a business suit.
As always, if I'm wrong on any of that, feel free to correct me. I am not an expert, I'm just a woman who likes to learn about other cultures and does her best to respect them which is more than I can say for the people running this multi-million dollar show that "wants the world to get to know the elements of Chinese culture" which is the official reason we got the zodiac kwami. You know, the kwami that are never once called the zodiac kwami in the actual show raising the question of how anyone is supposed to learn anything about Chinese culture from them! I mean, I'm learning a lot, but supplemental research to fact check canon's nonsense does not count as the show educating me!
