COME AND SEE THE Chinese family on the day when the clothes handed down for generations are given their annual sunning! The dust that has settled over the strife and strain of lives lived long ago is shaken out and set dancing in the yellow sun. If ever memory has a smell, it is the scent of camphor, sweet and cosy like remembered happiness, sweet and forlorn like forgotten sorrow. You walk down the path between the bamboo poles, flanked on each side by the walls of gorgeous silks and satins, an excavated corridor in a long-buried house of fashion. You press your forehead against the gold embroideries, sun-warmed a moment ago but now cold. The sun has gone down on that slow, smooth, gold-embroidered world.

We find it hard to realize that less than fifty years ago it seemed a world without end. Imagine the reign of Queen Victoria prolonged to the length of three centuries! Such was the stability, the uniformity, the extreme conventionality of China under the Manchus that generation after generation of women clung to the same dress style.

250 Years of Formalization

Almost throughout the Ching Dynasty (1644-1911), the classical ensemble was a jacket-and-trousers combination. In size and length the jacket corresponded to the modern swagger coat. The collar was very low; huge sleeves and trousers gave a feeling of statuesque repose. The sleeves measured over two feet in width but were later somewhat modified. The complete costume included not only the ‘Great Jacket’ worn outside but also the ‘Intermediate Jacket’ (shown only on informal occasions when the Great Jacket was removed), and the tightly fitting ‘Small Jacket’ worn in bed and usually of some enticing shade, peach or ‘liquid red.’ On top of all this came the ‘Cloudy-Shouldered Sleeveless Jacket,’ so called because of its broad edging in the pattern of stylized curling clouds, striking against the plain dark ground.

Under those layers of clothing, the ideal Chinese female, petite and slender, with sloping shoulders and a hollow chest, made herself pleasantly unobtrusive, one of the most desirable qualities in a woman. History shows that even the more spectacular virtues – hacking off an arm, for instance, when it was accidentally seen by a stranger in its entirety – though much eulogized by the vulgar, were never quite approved by the intelligentsia, for a woman should not attract too much attention or get her name tarnished in the steamy breath of men. As women who sought distinction even by such honorable means were severely censured, no mention need be made of those who claimed attention by some disturbing deviation from the accepted mode of attire.

The strictest formalization prevailed in the matter of the skirt, worn outside the trousers on ceremonial occasions. Made of either gauze or crepe, it was usually black, but on festive days red for the wife and pink for the concubine. Of course, red was taboo to the widow, who was confined to black; but she might, after a decent number of years had elapsed since her bereavement, wear lavender or ‘lake blue,’ provided that her parents-in-law were still alive. The narrow pleats, numbering up to a hundred, served as a time-honored test of feminine grace. The thoroughbred took such tiny steps when she walked and held herself with such dignity and restraint that there was visible but a slight, practically imperceptible quiver in the pleated lines; whereas the maiden of low degree, however enchanting, went tramp, tramp, tramp, causing a boisterous commotion in the delicate folds. Even more trying was the bridal skirt, also pleated, and red, with innumerable sashes half an inch broad hanging down vertically, each with a little bell attached. The idea was to walk in such a manner that there was but a faint tinkle, like that of the bells on a distant pagoda in a dying wind. These skirts were not abolished till long after the Revolution, in the 1920s, when gathered skirts with a freer, more billowy effect came into vogue.

Rules For Furs

The least heterodoxy in the wearing of furs betrayed the parvenu. Since only a few weeks were assigned to each kind of fur, one was very liable to wear furs out of season. In an unexpectedly cold October it was permissible to wear three fur-lined jackets, but in picking the right jackets one had to refer to the season rather than the weather. In early winter ‘Small Furs’ were worn, starting with Persian lamb, proceeding up the scale with ‘purple lamb,’ ‘pearly lamb,’ ermine, squirrel, and then on to the ‘Intermediate Furs’ – ‘squirrel back,’ ‘fox leg,’ ‘Japanese sword’; then the ‘Great Furs’ – white fox, blue fox, ‘western fox,’ ‘black fox,’ ‘purple sable’ – the last named, however, being confined to those with official rank. Men from the lower-middle class downwards, much more accustomed to wearing fur than their modern counterparts, generally contented themselves with sheepskin and ‘gold-and-silver fox’ – an inexpensive patchwork of the white and yellow parts on the belly and back. The fur linings stuck out showily half an inch or so at the cuffs and the hems.

Young ladies brightened up the bleak winter months with the ‘Chow Kwuen Hood,’ named after the historical beauty Wang Chow Kwuen, an imperial handmaid in the second century A.D. She is always pictured on horseback, with a fur hood and a despondent expression, on her way north to marry the king of the Huns, whom it was China’s policy to pacify. Her celebrated hood had the grand simplicity of the modern Eskimo variety which Hollywood made popular. But the nineteenth-century Chinese version was gay and absurd – a black satin cap of the kind worn by men, but fur-rimmed, and with a large red pompon on top and a pair of pink satin ribbons trailing behind, at the ends of which gold seals were sewn which made a bell-like tinkle.

Significant Details

This excessive attention to details characterized the Chinese costume of that era. In modern hats and dresses the details always have a point – to bring out the color of the eyes, to create the illusion of a bosom, to lengthen, to shorten, to call attention to the waist, to annihilate the hips, etc. The details of old Chinese clothes, however, were astonishingly pointless. They were purely decorative, and sometimes rather obscurely so. No artist could, for instance, have hoped for anyone to notice his intricate designs on the soles of women’s shoes, except indirectly by the imprints left in the dust. The homemade soles, manufactured from cardboard and paste and bits of old cloth, had white stitching on a dark ground, forming chaste, abstract patterns with a Moslem touch. The edges of the slightly raised heels were also covered with elaborate designs, in fact, there was not a square millimeter on the tiny shoe that was not alive with some rhythmic motif.

The spacious jacket was overloaded with either ‘three pipings, three bindings,’ or ‘five pipings, five bindings,’ or ‘seven pipings, seven bindings.’ Sequins sparked at the hem and the flapped-over opening in patterns of orchid, chrysanthemum, or plum blossom. The middle of the sleeve, at some distance from the bindings, featured a special kind of trimming bought in rolls about seven inches wide, called the ‘railings.’ It consisted of embroidered silk with holes cut out to form the characters ‘blessing’ and ‘longevity.’

The tremendous amassing of bits and bits of interest, this continual digression and reckless irrelevancy, this dissipation of energy in things which do not matter, marked the attitude towards life of the leisurely class of the most leisurely country in the world. It took as much time and energy to appreciate as to create such nice distinctions between a hundred lineal designs that were almost the same, but not quite.

The trouble with old Chinese dress designers was that they did not know the all-importance of brevity. After all, a woman is not a Gothic cathedral. And even with the latter, the diffusion of interest by the heaping up of distracting details has occasioned much criticism. The history of Chinese fashions consists almost exclusively of the steady elimination of those details.

Damsels In Distress

It was, of course, not as simple as that. There was above all the wax and wane in size. The first real change came near the end of the dynasty, in the thirty-second or thirty-third year of the reign of the Emperor Kwang Hsu, when the railways, no longer a novelty, began to play a vital part in Chinese life and the whims and fancies of high society in the great commercial ports were swiftly introduced into the interior. The size of clothes dwindled. For a time, the traditional pipings and ‘railings’ still prevailed, but they soon gave way to the single line of ‘wick binding,’ thin and delicate. In periods of political unrest and social upheaval – the Renaissance in Europe, for instance – tight-fitting clothes which allow for quick movement always come into favour. Jerkins in fifteenth-century Italy were so tight that slits had to be made at the joints of the body. Chinese clothes just stopped short of bursting open in the turbulent days when the Revolution was in the making. The last emperor, Pu-yi, reigned for only three years, and by then the jacket clung like a sheath to the arms and body. And such were the wonders of Chinese corseting that even then we did not see the realistic picture of a feminine figure, but rather the disembodied conception, one of Byzantine severity and Pre-Raphaelite spirituality: slim, straight lines flaring a little at the knees, whence issued tiny trouser legs which dropped a timorous hint of even tinier shoes apologetically attached to the ground. There was something infinitely pathetic about those pencil-slim trouser, and in Chinese poetry the terms ‘lovely’ and ‘pitiful’ were identical. The protective instinct, always strong in men, was perhaps stimulated by the hard times which saw the death of the old order and the birth of the new. Women, formerly staid and self-possessed in their wide garments, now found it to their advantage to act the ‘damsel in distress.’

It was also an age of extremes, with the evils of the governmental and domestic systems intensified by decay. We had on the one hand the sweeping condemnation of all that was traditional – nay, all that was Chinese – by the young intelligentsia, and, on the other hand, increased oppression by the old and sedate, who were shocked into action. Hysterical controversies raged day in and day out at home, in the newspapers, in the restaurants, at the playhouses. Even the perfumed and powdered leading man, the darling of wealthy concubines, commented ad lib, on contemporary politics to his ladylove on the stage.

The atmosphere of emotional excess, unprecedented in the history of a land of moderation and good sense, produced such a thing as the ‘Sycee collar,’ a tall, stiff collar reaching to the level of the nose. A long neck of swanlike grace was consequently much admired. This formidable collar, in addition to the oppressive hair-down coiffure of that period, was altogether disproportionate to the willowy limbs and torso in fashion. The top-heavy, unbalanced effect was one of the signs of the times.

Coiffures Dignified but Dull

The earlier hair-do (prevalent from the founding of the dynasty in the middle of the seventeenth century down to the close of the nineteenth, when it first sensed the coming doom) was clean-cut and matronly. The hair was gently drawn back, pulled down a little over the ears to cover them, and formed a knot at the back. The Yangchow style had the knot higher up and the Soochow style had it lower down the nape of the neck – Yangchow and Soochow being then the foremost cities, rival centers of wealth and sophistication, roughly equal in position to Hong Kong and Shanghai today. A wide, squarish forehead, a little rounded at the temples to complete the oval outline of the face, was held to be ideal. Women with irregular hairlines shaved their forehead. Instead of razors they used a cotton thread pulled to high tension. It had no hardening effect on the hair-roots and left no bluish mark.

Young girls had either plaits or two round knots of hair done high on the sides of the head. When they married, before they switched over to the grown-up coiffure, they broadened and heightened their foreheads for the first time with the method described above.

The only experiment to temper the monotony, the alarming stateliness, of such a hair-do was made in the middle of the dynasty. A short fringe about one inch long, sticking out almost horizontally from the forehead, stayed in vogue for years, though we now consider it extremely unflattering. For some obscure reason it was called ‘a sky full of stars.’

The general features of this coiffure were calculated to give a self-sufficient, sedentary, precociously old expression symbolical of the Celestial Kingdom, its confidence in its own strength, its happy imbecility, its flashes of philosophy and wisdom.

Profusion and Confusion

Then came the great shake-up. The utmost confusion in the matter of women’s hair near the end of the dynasty and the beginning of the Republic can well be imagined from the account given by Lin Chin-Nan (林琴南), a well-known novelist responsible for the large-scale translation of popular English fiction into classical Chinese, in his book Sketches in the Hut of Fear (畏庐琐记):

When I was young, a woman’s hair-knot was usually in the shape of a Sycee. A little later it was prolonged to the shape of a spoon, called the ‘Soochow Hair-knot.’ Two knots right and left were called the Pipa Style [Pi-pa is a form of guitar.] Wire matting was tucked inside the ‘Castanet Hair-knot’ to give it shape. The ‘Round Hair-knot’ was the most common during this last decade, but recently I have seen the greatest eccentricities. The hair-knot trails so loosely on the back that to hold it up you have to fix some false hair under it, matted to make two little hard saucers, which can be obtained in the shops. Another style has the hair twirled over the forehead like spirited serpents; some call that the ‘Republican Hair-knot.’ Occasionally, I see ladies passing by in carriages who just let their hair down and tie a false knot at the end of it – I can’t think of what to call that.

Mr Lin enumerates all the famous hair styles in ancient times. Quite apart from the historical value of such a record, it is interesting to find that, as far as we can guess at the shape of the ancient hair-dos from the picturesque titles, all the modern creations of Western hairdressers have been done before, the only difference being that the old Chinese hair-knots were solid while the modern puffs and rolls are hollow.

The earliest hair-knots were merely hair twisted together with nothing to tie it up. A king in about the twelfth century B.C. added dangling ornaments of pearls and jade to make the ‘Hair-knot which Sways at Every Step.’ Ching Hsi Huang, the first emperor of united China and the builder of the Great Wall, found pleasure in the ‘Hair-knot which Rises above the Clouds,’ very becoming to petite maidens, if we are to believe the writers of modern beauty columns. Ladies at the Han Court designed coiffures entitled ‘Welcome Spring,’ (with an eager forward tilt) and ‘Two Hearts in One,’ ‘Smoky,’ ‘Joy and Melancholy.’ The Han princesses were the first to wear wigs. The ‘Double Hair-knot,’ the ‘Half-turned Hair-knot,’ the ‘Hair-turned Hair-knot,’ the ‘Hair-knot of the Homing Bird,’ the ‘Hair-knot of the Coming Mood,’ and the ‘Hair-knot of Surrender,’ charmed many an emperor in the Tang palaces.

Aside from those court fashions, the wife of an official dressed her hair in a style called ‘Falling off the Horse,’ with a towering puff tilted on one side and plenty of soft loops flying free (which, by the way, is very popular in present-day Shanghai). ‘Falling off the Horse,’ in vogue in Tang China just before the civil wars and the invasion of the five barbarian tribes, was reputed to be an ill omen, foreshadowing the tragic spectacles of high-born ladies taken captive by unruly soldiers and borne off struggling on the chargers. Also fashionable in the capital city of Chan-An were the ‘Hair-knot of Homeless Wandering’ (suggestive of the ‘wind-blown’ bob of some years ago), the ‘Hair-knot à la Japanese,’ the ‘Hair-knot of One Hundred Ringlets,’ and the ‘Loose Hair-knot,’ or the ‘Hair-knot of Disintegration.’

‘As for the latest hair-style,’ concludes Mr. Lin who wrote in the last years of the Manchu Dynasty,

That which ties a false knot at the end of loose-hanging hair, a likely name for it should be the ‘Hair-knot of Disintegration and Homeless Wandering.’ What an omen! The times are indeed out-of-joint! I tremble to think of what is to come.

In spite of this welter of fantastic hair-dos to choose from, the only universally popular style in the first decades of the twentieth century was the thick fringe cut in the shape of the Chinese character for man (人), a pointed arch which gave the features underneath a melancholy downward slant, a sickly prettiness. The heavy fringe and the tall collar cut across the face left very little of the face to be seen. The encased feeling typified the suppressed, unhappy atmosphere of the age.

Hats and Mental Equilibrium

Chinese women do not wear hats nowadays, but they used to. The hat was nothing but a black satin band around the head. In the early Chin period, the hat-line on the forehead was round, echoing the rounded hairline. Later it became pointed to match the pointed arch of the fringe. Jewel ornaments, called ‘Hat Equilibriums’ because they were placed in the very center of the brow, numbered as many as five in the very beginning, making a single vertical row down the broad band. As the hat altered its shape the jewels were left out one by one. Finally there was only room for a solitary pearl. The last we saw of that pearl was also the last of the hat. Since the Revolution, millinery has been a lost art.

It was no more coincidence that the ‘Hat Equilibrium’ disappeared simultaneously with the traditional emphasis on balance. Republican zealots found the hallowed principle of the golden mean to have a retarding influence on the great amount of destructive and constructive work to be done in the new state. It is noticeable that in China even a passionate renunciation was delivered with tact. The jewels on women’s hats dropped off one at a time, so as to avoid an abrupt break with the past.

Early Republican Idealism

With the Manchu Empire overthrown, there followed a period of superficial enlightenment. The infancy of the Republic, was a time when Rousseauistic sentiments were taken very seriously. Students of Western culture had great faith in ‘Every Man with a Vote,’ ‘Away with filial Piety,’ ‘Free Love,’ etc. Experiments were also made in purely mental love, without much success. The typical coiffure of the day – hair parted in the middle to form a knot on each side, a fringe long enough to cover the eyebrows – had an air of affected naiveté.

Clothes were never before so light and gay. The ‘Trumpet Sleeve,’ like the Western bishop sleeve, only shorter, began tight and ended a little below the elbow, large, breezy, and fluttering. The jacket reached only to the hips. The waist was beautifully molded. Ladies of the upper classes wore a gathered skirt, usually black, when they went out, but at home they had on only short pants ending at the knee. which was also where the silk stockings ended – very daring and provocative. A stockinet sash with silk fringes was used to tie up the pants. Naughty ladies had about a foot of it hanging down in front under the jacket. It was declared to be of frankly erotic interest.

Western Influence

Much of the inspiration in early Republican styles was drawn from the West. The collar was at first reduced in height, then practically done away with. The open collar, round, square, heart-shaped, diamond-shaped; white stockinet scarves for all seasons; white silk stockings with black embroideries crawling up the ankles: these were taken directly from European fashions of the day. The indiscriminate importation of things foreign went to such an extent that society girls and professional beauties wore spectacles for ornament, since spectacles were a sign of modernity.

New China was in a state of unrest. Warlords came and went, each trailing his own cloud of employees, civil government bodies, measures of reform; and Fashion tripped behind on its light, fantastic toes, trying to catch up. The hem of the jacket, square at first, became round, then V-shaped, then hexagonal. The swift changes rendered women’s clothes practically worthless in the pawnshops. Gone were the days when clothes were as ageless as jewellery, fetching as ready a price on the market.

Swift Changes = Mental Activity?

Quick alterations in style do not necessarily denote mental fluidity or readiness to adopt new ideas. Quite the contrary. It may show general inactivity, frustration in other fields of action so that all the intellectual and artistic energy is forced to flow into the channel of clothes. In an age of political disorder, people were powerless to modify existing conditions closer to their ideal. All they could do was to create their own atmosphere, with clothes, which constitute for most men and all women their immediate environments. We live in our clothes.

The Disillusioned Late Twenties

The year 1921 saw the advent of the long gown for women. This garment, the native costume of Manchu women, called even now the ‘Banner Gown’ [Ed. note: this is another name for qipao] in memory of the Eight Banners under which the Manchu hordes invaded China in the seventeenth century, had always run side by side unnoticed with the main current of Chinese fashions. It was stiff and masculine. Manchu ladies, when they first settled down in China, showed an inclination to switch over to the softer, more alluring Chinese jacket and trousers, but were severely reprimanded by imperial edicts. The sudden universal adoption of this tribal gown was not caused by a popular restoration movement but by women’s desire to copy men. Women’s clothes in China from time immemorial had been analogous to the ‘blouse-and-skirt’ institution, while men’s clothes since the beginning of the Manchu Dynasty had no break at the waist. A he-man, when challenged, would strike his breast and protest that he was not one who ‘wore clothes with two sections,’ that is, he was no woman. A small point perhaps, but women in the 1920s were supersensitive to immaterial differentiations of this sort. Having cheered themselves hoarse for the Western pamphleteers who championed the cause of their equality with men, they looked around at humiliating reality and, soured and angry, were driven to reject their very womanhood. A new wave of hardened feeling prevailed over the gushing girlishness of the early Republic. The first long gowns for women were angular and puritanical. Idealism and dainty escapism could not forever maintain themselves in the face of repeated national disasters. The fashions now had a curt, tightened look. The long gown, first given wide sleeves, soon had long, narrow ones. The ‘incense-stick binding’ was fine and round. Fringes and bangs went out. Hair was pulled back straight to form a bun in the ‘Cooling Coiffure.’

When Chinese women first became curl-conscious in 1928, they drew their hair back, flat and smooth, made halfhearted little waves at the ends, and compromisingly clipped them into an imitation bun. From that time on, Chinese coiffures strictly followed Western trends, though always lagging a year or two behind.

The Cynical Thirties

In the 1930s the elbow-length sleeves were cylindrical, and so was the collar. The tall collar was revived, this time uglier than ever because it no longer cut diagonally across the jawbones as it had formerly been in order to give a heart-shaped effect to the face. It was now tubular, pressing the chin hard to make it double. No excuse could be made for such a collar except that it acted as an adequate expression of the intellectual sensuality of the Thirties – an upright, remote little head, the head of a goddess, perched on top of a voluptuous, free-flowing figure. What sensuality there was, was reasoned and deliberate.

The military-looking, double-breasted, belted coat of the West fell in with the stringent mood. Was it the Oriental sense of moderation which softened it by wearing underneath a floor-length gown of sleek velveteen, with scandalously long slits up the thighs, revealing the long floppy pants of the same fabric, edged with silver lace, suggestive of harems? A strange combination it was, symbolic of the educated women of the day, aggressive feminists in theory but rapaciously materialistic when it came to the point.

Simplification and Traditional Revival

The most important of latest innovations were the removal of the sleeves (a gradual and infinitely cautious procedure, judging from the number of years it took) and the reduction of both the height of the collar and the length of the gown. It all added up to a grand sum of subtraction – the stripping off of all ornaments, either necessary or unnecessary, to conform to principles of the barest functionalism.

The newest trends point to an inclination to go back to the past, in general aspect if not in decorative details. They herald a traditional revival in more serious fields.

Fashion in China is not an industry under the control of a few great fashion houses like Lelong’s or Schiaparelli’s. Our tailors are helpless before the vast, unaccountable strange waves of communal fancies which make themselves manifest from time to time.

It is impossible to tell who starts these fashions, because the Chinese do not greatly prize originality, regarding imitation as a great compliment, so that the first one to wear something different is invariably lost among a host of copycats. Shanghai attributes the birth of the recent movement for wide, three-quarter length sleeves to Hong Kong, and Hong Kong, with the shirking of responsibility habitual to the Chinese race, lays the blame on Shanghai.

In pre-Revolution costumes, the individual was wholly submerged in the form – the form being a subjective representation of the human figure, conventionalized as always in Oriental art, dictated by a sense of line rather than faithfulness to the original. Post-Revolution clothes slowly worked towards the opposite direction – the subjugation of form by the figure. Two years ago, when we had got to the sleeveless gown, nothing was left of the gown but a molded trunk, with bare arms and neck. The return of sleeves in 1941 meant the return of form. It marked the turn of the tide towards a new formalization. Once again, China is standing at the threshold of life, more grim and practical this time, surer of her own mind because of the lessons she has learnt.

Eileen Chang (張愛玲), born in 1920 in Shanghai, was one of China’s most celebrated literary figures, publishing novels, short stories, essays, and translations. “Chinese Life And Fashion” was published on the eve of Love In A Fallen City, the celebrated novella of her debut short story collection.

LITTLE MRS. SOMMERS ONE day found herself the unexpected possessor of fifteen dollars. It seemed to her a very large amount of money, and the way in which it stuffed and bulged her worn old porte-monnaie gave her a feeling of importance such as she had not enjoyed for years.

The question of investment was one that occupied her greatly. For a day or two she walked about apparently in a dreamy state, but really absorbed in speculation and calculation. She did not wish to act hastily, to do anything she might afterward regret. But it was during the still hours of the night when she lay awake revolving plans in her mind that she seemed to see her way clearly toward a proper and judicious use of the money.

A dollar or two should be added to the price usually paid for Janie’s shoes, which would insure their lasting an appreciable time longer than they usually did. She would buy so and so many yards of percale for new shirt waists for the boys and Janie and Mag. She had intended to make the old ones do by skillful patching. Mag should have another gown. She had seen some beautiful patterns, veritable bargains in the shop windows. And still there would be left enough for new stockings – two pairs apiece – and what darning that would save for a while! She would get caps for the boys and sailor-hats for the girls. The vision of her little brood looking fresh and dainty and new for once in their lives excited her and made her restless and wakeful with anticipation.

The neighbours sometimes talked of certain ‘better days’ that little Mrs. Sommers had known before she had ever thought of being Mrs. Sommers. She herself indulged in no such morbid retrospection. She had no time – no second of time to devote to the past. The needs of the present absorbed her every faculty. A vision of the future like some dim, gaunt monster sometimes appalled her, but luckily tomorrow never comes.

Mrs. Sommers was one who knew the value of bargains; who could stand for hours making her way inch by inch toward the desired object that was selling below cost. She could elbow her way if need be; she had learned to clutch a piece of goods and hold it and stick to it with persistence and determination till her turn came to be served, no matter when it came.

But that day she was a little faint and tired. She had swallowed a light luncheon –no! when she came to think of it, between getting the children fed and the place righted, and preparing herself for the shopping bout, she had actually forgotten to eat any luncheon at all!

She sat herself upon a revolving stool before a counter that was comparatively deserted, trying to gather strength and courage to charge through an eager multitude that was besieging breastworks of shirting and figured lawn. An all-gone limp feeling had come over her and she rested her hand aimlessly upon the counter. She wore no gloves. By degrees she grew aware that her hand had encountered something very soothing, very pleasant to touch. She looked down to see that her hand lay upon a pile of silk stockings. A placard near by announced that they had been reduced in price from two dollars and fifty cents to one dollar and ninety-eight cents; and a young girl who stood behind the counter asked her if she wished to examine their line of silk hosiery. She smiled, just as if she had been asked to inspect a tiara of diamonds with the ultimate view of purchasing it. But she went on feeling the soft, sheeny luxurious things – with both hands now, holding them up to see them glisten, and to feel them glide serpent-like through her fingers.

Two hectic blotches came suddenly into her pale cheeks. She looked up at the girl.

‘Do you think there are any eights-and-a-half among these?’

There were any number of eights-and-a-half. In fact, there were more of that size than any other. Here was a light-blue pair; there were some lavender, some all black and various shades of tan and gray. Mrs. Sommers selected a black pair and looked at them very long and closely. She pretended to be examining their texture, which the clerk assured her was excellent.

‘A dollar and ninety-eight cents,’ she mused aloud. ‘Well, I’ll take this pair.’ She handed the girl a five-dollar bill and waited for her change and for her parcel. What a very small parcel it was! It seemed lost in the depths of her shabby old shopping-bag.

Mrs. Sommers after that did not move in the direction of the bargain counter. She took the elevator, which carried her to an upper floor into the region of the ladies’ waiting-rooms. Here, in a retired corner, she exchanged her cotton stockings for the new silk ones which she had just bought. She was not going through any acute mental process or reasoning with herself, nor was she striving to explain to her satisfaction the motive of her action. She was not thinking at all. She seemed for the time to be taking a rest from that laborious and fatiguing function and to have abandoned herself to some mechanical impulse that directed her actions and freed her of responsibility.

How good was the touch of the raw silk to her flesh! She felt like lying back in the cushioned chair and revelling for a while in the luxury of it. She did for a little while. Then she replaced her shoes, rolled the cotton stockings together and thrust them into her bag. After doing this she crossed straight over to the shoe department and took her seat to be fitted.

She was fastidious. The clerk could not make her out; he could not reconcile her shoes with her stockings, and she was not too easily pleased. She held back her skirts and turned her feet one way and her head another way as she glanced down at the polished, pointed-tipped boots. Her foot and ankle looked very pretty. She could not realise that they belonged to her and were a part of herself. She wanted an excellent and stylish fit, she told the young fellow who served her, and she did not mind the difference of a dollar or two more in the price so long as she got what she desired.

It was a long time since Mrs. Sommers had been fitted with gloves. On rare occasions when she had bought a pair they were always ‘bargains,’ so cheap that it would have been preposterous and unreasonable to have expected them to be fitted to the hand.

Now she rested her elbow on the cushion of the glove counter, and a pretty, pleasant young creature, delicate and deft of touch, drew a long-wristed ‘kid’ over Mrs. Sommers’s hand. She smoothed it down over the wrist and buttoned it neatly, and both lost themselves for a second or two in admiring contemplation of the little symmetrical gloved hand. But there were other places where money might be spent.

There were books and magazines piled up in the window of a stall a few paces down the street. Mrs. Sommers bought two high-priced magazines such as she had been accustomed to read in the days when she had been accustomed to other pleasant things. She carried them without wrapping. As well as she could she lifted her skirts at the crossings. Her stockings and boots and well fitting gloves had worked marvels in her bearing – had given her a feeling of assurance, a sense of belonging to the well-dressed multitude.

She was very hungry. Another time she would have stilled the cravings for food until reaching her own home, where she would have brewed herself a cup of tea and taken a snack of anything that was available. But the impulse that was guiding her would not suffer her to entertain any such thought.

There was a restaurant at the corner. She had never entered its doors; from the outside she had sometimes caught glimpses of spotless damask and shining crystal, and soft-stepping waiters serving people of fashion.

When she entered her appearance created no surprise, no consternation, as she had half feared it might. She seated herself at a small table alone, and an attentive waiter at once approached to take her order. She did not want a profusion; she craved a nice and tasty bite – a half dozen blue-points, a plump chop with cress, a something sweet – a crême-frappée, for instance; a glass of Rhine wine, and after all a small cup of black coffee.

While waiting to be served she removed her gloves very leisurely and laid them beside her. Then she picked up a magazine and glanced through it, cutting the pages with a blunt edge of her knife. It was all very agreeable. The damask was even more spotless than it had seemed through the window, and the crystal more sparkling. There were quiet ladies and gentlemen, who did not notice her, lunching at the small tables like her own. A soft, pleasing strain of music could be heard, and a gentle breeze, was blowing through the window. She tasted a bite, and she read a word or two, and she sipped the amber wine and wiggled her toes in the silk stockings. The price of it made no difference. She counted the money out to the waiter and left an extra coin on his tray, whereupon he bowed before her as before a princess of royal blood.

There was still money in her purse, and her next temptation presented itself in the shape of a matinée poster.

It was a little later when she entered the theatre, the play had begun and the house seemed to her to be packed. But there were vacant seats here and there, and into one of them she was ushered, between brilliantly dressed women who had gone there to kill time and eat candy and display their gaudy attire. There were many others who were there solely for the play and acting. It is safe to say there was no one present who bore quite the attitude which Mrs. Sommers did to her surroundings. She gathered in the whole – stage and players and people in one wide impression, and absorbed it and enjoyed it. She laughed at the comedy and wept – she and the gaudy woman next to her wept over the tragedy. And they talked a little together over it. And the gaudy woman wiped her eyes and sniffled on a tiny square of filmy, perfumed lace and passed little Mrs. Sommers her box of candy.

The play was over, the music ceased, the crowd filed out. It was like a dream ended. People scattered in all directions. Mrs. Sommers went to the corner and waited for the cable car.

A man with keen eyes, who sat opposite to her, seemed to like the study of her small, pale face. It puzzled him to decipher what he saw there. In truth, he saw nothing – unless he were wizard enough to detect a poignant wish, a powerful longing that the cable car would never stop anywhere, but go on and on with her forever.

This story was originally published in 1897 in Vogue.

The seventh issue of Vestoj, ‘On Masculinities,’ is in stores this month. In conjunction, Vestoj Online is publishing a series of articles on the same theme.

THE FIGURE OF ‘JAMES Bond,’ created in 1953 by novelist Ian Fleming and translated to the screen ten years later, has lost none of its potency. The spy with expensive, sophisticated tastes – and the income needed to satisfy them – still appeals strongly to the popular imagination. The ‘Bond’ films are noted for their overall stylishness – the award-winning sets, the credit titles with their New Bauhaus input in the early years and, of course, the suits. In 2012 the Barbican Centre in London commissioned a substantial and successful exhibition ‘Designing 007: Fifty Years of Bond Style;’ it has been touring the world ever since. In 1987, however, media sociologists Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott had speculated about the possible future of the franchise.¹ But as the same decade brought about both a revolution in menswear and the creation of a market for male ‘grooming products,’ the well-dressed spy survived. The following two decades prolonged his life much further, through the growth of ‘brand recognition’ and the worldwide marketing of European luxury goods; both now accompany, and in part finance, these films.  

There is nothing on ‘Bond style’ within fashion scholarship, despite the innumerable academic interventions over the last thirty or more years. But Bond has been saluted as icon of taste within the pages of men’s magazines since his inception; in the run-up to the release of the latest film, Sam Mendes’ Spectre, GQ published a series of special issues. However, this essay will suggest that in recent years there has been an undermining of Bonds’ style – and even the actual cinematic narratives themselves – as product placement and commercial partnerships threaten the autonomy of both costume designer and director.   

Bond was very much a creation of the 1950s – a decade marked at first by austerity but which saw economic expansion, full employment, and new patterns of spending. Fleming directly appealed to his male readers’ fantasies and gave them guidance as to how they might use their new disposable income by describing in careful detail Bond’s every change of dress: the shirts, the ties, the shoes, the casual outfits, the expensive fabrics and muted colours. He also offered them the hero’s endless womanising and his successful bedding of desirable, equally well-dressed women – which continued on screen, though there the women were by contrast scantily-clad, and which has interestingly been rather restrained during Daniel Craig’s current stewardship. All this helped to foster the relationship between Fleming, Bond and Playboy magazine, first published in the very year of Bond’s debut. As film scholars Pam Cook and Claire Hines argue, its admiration for both Fleming and his hero was not only a part of ‘the consumerist, sexualised and liberated lifestyle that it promoted;’ it was also because the magazine took men’s fashion very seriously.² 

The meticulous but understated style which Fleming portrayed so successfully was carefully recreated when the first film was made in 1962. Cultural historian Christopher Breward addresses Bond’s cinematic incarnation and sees Sean Connery’s Savile Row suit as a ‘vessel for aspirational promise.’ Connery, he argues, had an ‘everyman’ appeal, while his ‘reticent machismo offered the ideal mannequin around which Fleming’s discreet indications of flawless style could be dressed.’ He notes, significantly, that his suits were notable for ‘resisting the flamboyance of fashion.’ Connery’s suits, as Breward tells us, ‘adhered to the pared-down rules of the guardsman and changed little over the course of the six Bond films he made before 1971.’³ 

In the 1960s, decade of social change, actors, musicians, writers and cultural entrepreneurs from traditional working-class backgrounds enjoyed unprecedented success; this led to media claims that the country’s rigid class barriers were coming down. Connery himself was a Glaswegian bodybuilder, a former milkman, model, lifeguard, and lorry driver. Fleming in fact wanted the more patrician David Niven, while the producers favoured the ever-elegant Cary Grant; initially worried about Connery, he gradually came to accept him. The film’s director, Terence Young, took Connery to his own tailor for Bond’s screen wardrobe. This was part of a Pygmalion-like process: ‘he took him to dinner, showed him how to walk, how to talk, even how to eat.’⁴  There is an apocryphal suggestion that when the suits were finished, he told Connery to wear them all the time and even suggested that he should sleep in them, so that he might cease to be aware of their presence.

The ultra-conventional dress of this hero is very much at variance with the popular image of the 1960s, favoured in the mythologising of the era, which tends to emphasise youth, stylish subcultures, new music and changing fashions, in a way that as revisionist historian Dominic Sandbrook has shown, is not entirely accurate.⁵ Nevertheless, there were undeniably new and radically different models of masculinity which emerged during this contested decade. Marcello Mastroianni’s memorable portrayal of a cynical journalist in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita arguably inspired the ‘mods,’ with their sharp Italian tailoring, to wear black shirts under white suits. The Beatles favoured suits that were very different from those of Bond, and boys copied their long, floppy fringes, and the dancer Rudolf Nureyev and the Rolling Stones created newly androgynous modes of masculine dress. Mick Jagger famously wore a Grenadier Guards jacket to perform on television in 1966, thus sending large numbers of young men off to the shop I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet in Carnaby Street where he had purchased his own.

Bond, a staunch defender of Armed Forces and Empire, and Connery himself were both antithetical to and horrified by these developments. In Guy Hamilton’s Goldfinger from 1965, Bond tells the villain’s secretary, Jill Masterson, ‘My dear girl, there are some things that just aren’t done…’  such as ‘listening to the Beatles without earmuffs.’ Connery stated in an interview for Playboy that he himself did not like the Beatles and so approved of the line. He had in fact kept very quiet about the fact that he had modelled for the mail-order catalogues produced by the gay men’s boutique Vince while looking for acting jobs in London; author Fleming would have been appalled. Both writer and actor were probably horrified by the ruffled lace cravat worn by Connery’s successor, George Lazenby, in a nod to contemporary fashion. It was this, perhaps, that tempted Connery back for another appearance.

Roger Moore, who then took over for twelve years, imbued the role with overdeveloped humour and playboy behaviour. He eschewed Savile Row classicism and followed fashions: wide ties, flared trousers, conspicuous lapels. His interpretation of the part – and the films themselves – have an element of pastiche; he began his Bond career in 1973 by jumping lightly from crocodile to crocodile in Live and Let Die. His films showed no awareness of the shifts in gendered behaviour that characterised the next two decades. His replacement, Timothy Dalton, did seem to acknowledge change; he was far more serious – and soberly dressed. He was the first to embrace Italian tailoring as did Pierce Brosnan, who took over from him in 1995 and whose interpretation of Bond involved a good deal of deliberate, studied charm. Judi Dench, who took over as M, was unimpressed, telling him in one scene, ‘You’re a sexist, misogynist dinosaur, 007.’

Daniel Craig, Bond since 2006, perhaps listened and certainly provides a Bond who in many ways is quite different. He gives the first convincing, complex portrayal of the conflicted masculinity of a hired killer who must do his job, but who is not lacking in sensibility; he is even capable of falling in love, of feeling loss and betrayal. It seems the Vatican itself has noted these changes; their newspaper L’Ossera Romano praised 2012’s Skyfall for its new, introspective Bond, ‘less attracted to the pleasures of life, darker and more human… even able to cry – in a word, more real.’⁶ This new reality is combined with a physical strength and muscularity which make him seem – like Connery – worrying capable of carrying out the killings which his rank in the service demands.

The posters for Craig’s very first Bond film showed his dinner jacket hanging open, his black tie undone and flapping, while the black-and-white pre-credit sequence was a mix of cinema verité and film noir, partly shot in a shabby public lavatory. The credits of Spectre are a lavish and dramatic contrast; against a backdrop of molten gold, a line of dancers part to reveal the gilded, perfectly-proportioned and splendidly-muscled torso of Craig, posed as classical hero. A girl stands on either side; when his shoulders are stroked, small flames erupt. Craig’s body-as-spectacle, waxed and buffed, is an integral part of the reinvention of Bond and provides an interesting contrast with the extravagantly hairy body of Sean Connery. In Casino Royale, Craig’s first outing as Bond, it is the splendid body of the hero – and not that of a Bond girl – which rises Venus-like from the waves, a deliberate reference to Ursula Andress’ famous emergence from the sea in Dr. No. Now, it is the body of Bond at which we should ‘look’⁷ – while on a more mundane note, the La Perla swimming trunks he wears here were located instantly by fans and London stockists swiftly sold out.

If the figure of Bond is now openly the object of a homospectorial gaze, Craig and the scriptwriters also acknowledge the homoerotic potential of the series. Skyfall introduces Bond – and audiences – to a new, young Q, with rumpled hair and fashionable parka. He is played by openly gay actor Ben Whishaw, and wears sweaters by Missoni, Dries van Noten and Prada. In the same film, Craig himself responds almost flirtatiously to villain Javier Bardem’s stroking of his chest and thighs; when he says, ’What makes you so sure this is my first time?’ he seems almost to shock the bleached-blonde uber-terrorist, who moves back to the safety of his laptop.

By some terrible irony, it is this complicated and sometimes sombre hero whose style is compromised by commercial imperatives and the vagaries of fashion. In Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, protagonist Cary Grant had shown how classic Savile Row tailoring could survive even a chase through the dusty fields of the Midwest while under aerial attack. Connery always managed similar feats, in the suits created for him by Antony Sinclair, whose name did not actually appear in the cinematic credits. And so too did Craig on his very first excursion, when he was immaculately attired by Italian tailor Brioni. However, in the last two films he has been dressed in the ultra-fashionable suits of Tom Ford, now one of the four major sponsors of the franchise; Jany Termime, the costume designer, works alongside him. At the time of Skyfall, Ford’s jackets were a generous hip-length, and Craig tended to unbutton them so that he might maintain his dignity while in pursuit of his adversaries. But by the making of Spectre, fashions had changed and his suits with them; the jackets were now shorter and much narrower in cut. So sadly, in the action sequences the agile Craig looks as if he might burst out of the same skimpy suits at any moment; audiences fear for him, but it is a sartorial mishap, a split side seam, that they worry about, rather than a properly-aimed bullet from one of his adversaries. Nevertheless, Ford’s later designs have featured heavily on the many blogs and websites that now exist solely to describe and display the latest clothes and accessories seen in the films.

Despite their appeal to audiences, these particular, high-fashion suits arguably disrupt the proper operation of the narrative. In 1998, film scholar Stella Bruzzi famously argued that with costume on screen, there is always one vital question – do we look at or through the clothes?⁸ If we look at the clothes, the cinematic flow is disrupted – not desirable in an action film. But here, we cannot help but be distracted and are forced to look at the too-tight suits and the obtrusive details: the noticeable sunglasses, the shoes with their fashionable ‘monkstraps,’ the tight white dinner jacket Craig wears in Spectre which is far less flattering to him than the discreet black Brioni one he wears in Casino Royale.

In a new millennium, Bond is faced with many difficult tasks; these have included parachuting into the London Olympics beside the Queen as well as taking on multinational crime syndicates headed by shadowy constantly-morphing villains. Now it seems he may have to fight battles and companies much nearer to home, if he is to preserve his own stylish image. There are other threats to the franchise. Spectre was filmed in Mexico, and a government anxious to improve its own public image offered generous tax cuts; this lent a whole new dimension to the notion of ‘product placement.’ Most disturbingly, there is the threat of a new, bland Bond. Craig, the first actor who has imbued the part with the complexities of fraught modern masculinity, has announced that he may retire from the role. The candidate suggested as his most likely successor definitely lacks the depth of the current incumbent; Bond could become a mere clotheshorse, the films a parade of suits and sunglasses.

Pamela Church Gibson is Reader in Cultural and Historical Studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London.

1. T Bennett and J Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: the Political Career of a Popular Hero, Macmillan Education, London, 1987, p.295 ↩

2. P Cook and C Hines, ‘Sean Connery is James Bond: Re-fashioning British Masculinity in the 1960s,‘ in R. Moseley (ed.) Fashioning Film Stars: Dress, Culture, Identity, BFI Publishing, London, 2005, pp.147-160 ↩

3. C Breward, The Suit: Form, Function and Style, Reaktion Books, London, 2016, p.197 ↩

4. B Macintyre, For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond, London, Bloomsbury, 2008, p.205 ↩

5. D Sandbrook, White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties, London, Little, Brown, 2006 ↩

6. L’Osservatore Romano, Wednesday October 31st, 2012 ↩

7. See L Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ in Visual and Other Pleasures, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 ↩

8. S Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies, London, Routledge, 1997 ↩

‘The external spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold’¹ wrote the philosopher Gaston Bachelard. To take notice of our perceptions, let them rush in, blow over us, is a post-modern ritual, replacing ancient and religious modes of delivery: cleansing and healing. In consuming a spectacle, our senses are engaged. In this experience, we project our image, suspending it in space, meditating on our own void. In search of answers, we turn to spectacles that captivate our senses: art, theatre, fashion and cinema.

‘Like the sea, it reveals the depths of being within us.’

– Philippe Diolé²

‘When the waters rise, humanity will go back to the place from whence it came. “but then again, I’m no Nostradamus…”’

– Alexander McQueen³

‘Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.’

– Hiroshi Sugimoto⁴ 

‘Why is the spectacle of the sea so infinitely and eternally agreeable? Because the sea presents at once the idea of immensity and movement.’

– Charles Baudelaire⁵

Anna Ellinor Sundström is a photographer, filmmaker and founder of VNIVRS.

1. G Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, Boston, 1994, p. 182. ↩

2. P Diolé, The Most Beautiful Desert of All, Jonathan Cape, London, 1959, p. 14 ↩

3. http://www.alexandermcqueen.com/experience/en/alexandermcqueen/archive/?years=2010#id_article=260 ↩

4. http://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/seascape.html ↩

5. C Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, Dover Publications, New York, 2006, p. 90 ↩