Styling Shanghai

Christopher Breward, Juliette MacDonald

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350051133
• eBook ISBN: 9781350051157
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Fashion & Textile Industry
• Index: Business

Styling Shanghai is the first book dedicated to exploring the city's fashion cultures, examining its growing status as one of the world's foremost fashion cities. From its origins as an international treaty port in the 19th century, Shanghai has emerged as a global leader in the production, mediation and consumption of fashion. This book reveals how the material and imaginative context of this thriving urban centre has produced vivid interpretations of fashion as object, image and idea. Bringing together contributions by a range of leading international fashion historians and theorists, and drawing on extensive original research, Styling Shanghai offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the mega-city's shifting position as a fashion capital. Rooted in collaboration between leading UK, Australian and Shanghai-based institutions, it considers the impact of local and global textile manufacturing, the representation and marketing of 'Shanghai Style', bodies and gender in the 'Paris of the East', and the challenges of globalization, commercialization and digital communication in contemporary Shanghai.

1

Introduction

Christopher Breward

Among the many tourist guides to contemporary Shanghai, the handout provided by the cocktail bar and restaurant M on the Bund to trend-hungry travellers in the 2010s provides perhaps the most telling snapshot of entertainment in a city that has become a byword for fashionable pleasures. Its punchy listings of museums, warehouse art galleries, cinemas and concert halls, bookshops, markets, malls and designer stores, restaurants, bars, luxury hotels, spas and parks is both sharply contemporary and worldly in its snappy international-English idioms, but also rooted in a longer history of local tradition and global connection that places Shanghai within its own mythic narratives.¹

Such is the speed of change within the city, that M’s guide is liberally punctuated with website links and advice to seek updated information, yet also holds on to descriptions of outlets for ‘old stuff’, the ‘junk’ and material textures that describe a ‘classic’ Shanghai lexicon of the early twentieth century.² It is nevertheless a good source for the new visitor, particularly the new visitor from Australasia, Europe or North America, hungry to taste both sides. From Pudong airport in, the choice of transit between twenty-first-century high-speed Maglev, crowded subway or traffic-choked motorway sets up the contradictions. But once inside the city, which is surprisingly navigable to the novice, time, speed and space conflate and open up, offering an urban experience that is immediately intriguing to those with an interest in the interlinked histories of fashion and cities.

This book, rather like M’s guide aims at navigating past and present versions of fashion culture in Shanghai’s stimulating environment. In doing so it builds on an extensive literature concerning Shanghai’s development as an entrepôt linking China to the world and its localized narratives of consumption, pleasure and creative production, and a more recent interest in tracing networks of fashion cities within the context of global (rather than Eurocentric) histories. Its interests are firmly located in the varied perspectives of a cross-disciplinary and international collective of authors whose objects of focus cohere within the fabric of the city itself, a site we have been privileged to meet, research and discourse in at regular moments over the past five years.

Three Hundred Years of Change

So far as Shanghai is concerned, its story as a cosmopolitan centre for exchange is a unique one, whose circumstances define the distinct characteristics of its fashion cultures and style of presentation in the present. Complex territorial, political and social pressures have come to play varyingly upon the shape and personality of the city, attracting a significant scholarly interest from social, economic and urban historians. For the purposes of this study, a brief summary of growth and flux provides the broader context in which succeeding chapters should be placed.

Emerging as a fishing village at the mouth of the Yangzi river in the Song dynasty, by the mid-seventeenth century with the arrival of the East India Company and other European commercial interests in China, Shanghai had diversified to trade in textiles and tea, though its own interests and that of China at large were increasingly drawn into the damaging opium trade, which by 1839 had forced the first opium war and resulted ten years later in the ceding of Hong Kong to Great Britain and the complete opening up of Shanghai to international trade under the Treaty of Nanjing. Shanghai’s location at the cross-point of trading routes between Japan and the West, and into the heartlands of China proved highly attractive to European nations, Russia and the United States. Following intercession by the latter through the 1844 Treaty of Wangxia, the city became subject to the principle of extra-territoriality, which meant that foreigners resident in Shanghai and the other treaty ports were subject to their own national laws, rather than those of China, enjoying an unprecedented level of freedom and establishing a strong expatriate culture within the city’s zoned international districts or concessions.³

On these principles Shanghai began to grow as a polyglot, but highly demarcated conglomeration of nationalities and industries, marked by the distinctive architectural forms of banks, warehouses, mansions and pleasure palaces centred along the banks of the river. Behind the fine colonial facades an ever-expanding hinterland of slum dwellings housed the thousands of Chinese, escaping from rural poverty and servicing the needs of foreigners.⁴ Corruption, inequality and the desire for change resulted in a succession of violent rebellions, which eventually forced Chinese refugees into the Western enclaves, increasing competition for land and fuelling a real estate boom that still marks the city’s ethos today. By 1870 Shanghai’s Chinese population had exceeded 70,000. In this crowded context the city began to re-fashion itself as a modern metropolis, introducing department stores, tarmacked roads, gas lighting, and by the early twentieth century electricity and trams.⁵

Modernity grasped Shanghai with a power equal to the transformations taking place in Paris, New York, Vienna and London, but the geo-politics of location and history determined that such changes took on distinctively cosmopolitan and commercialized characteristics in the Yangzi Delta. The rapid opening up and modernization of Japan over the previous half-century exerted an inevitable pressure, with the investment of Japanese companies hastening heavy industrialization across the city. This was challenged by the dual influences of a strong tradition of scholarship and progressive thought among the Chinese professional classes. Technological and bureaucratic advancements thus went hand in hand with provocative and revolutionary thinking about the nature of power and an acute understanding of inherited cultures.⁶ Rapid change and the social inequalities it brought in its tow inspired political activism, and Shanghai’s buzzing streets and salons gave birth first to the nationalist movement of Sun Yat-sen and then in 1921 to the Chinese Communist Party.

Through the 1910s, 1920s and early 1930s Shanghai witnessed both the violent political turmoil of nationalist versus communist struggle, the burgeoning confidence of a local literary and philosophical tradition, and the parallel decadence of expatriate culture. In the latter case, and so far as stereotypical understandings of fashion history go, this was the golden era of Shanghai’s reputation as a glamorous and corrupting city of creativity, style and pleasure, known as the ‘Paris of the East’.⁷ In the concessions, dance halls, cinemas, restaurants and brothels boomed, and while foreign emigres were free to come and go at their leisure, the majority of the local Chinese population were banned from the elegant parks and could only find their place in servile roles of labour or sexual exploitation. Meanwhile, the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek became embroiled in civil war with resurgent communist agitators alongside increased aggression from Japan, who in 1937 cut off Shanghai’s river trade with inland China, precipitating industrial decline and the flight of foreign investors from the city.

A decade later, by the rise of Mao Zedong, luminous Shanghai had been reduced to a grey shadow. Its former materialism, metropolitanism, amorality and sophistication symbolized all that the Communist Party sought to eradicate and, in a bid to reclaim its political influence and atone, the city’s communist fathers were doubly fanatical in their adherence to the new puritanism. It was no coincidence that Mao chose to launch the Cultural Revolution from the city in 1966. But it was also in this most fluxive and entrepreneurial of cities that the counter-revolution emerged in the 1990s. Under the policies of one-party capitalism promoted by Deng Xiaoping, Shanghai became an autonomous municipality and a ‘Special Economic Zone’ in which the virtues of trade, development and individualism were encouraged rather than suppressed.⁸

In the twenty-first century Shanghai has changed beyond recognition. Its turn as host of the 2010 World Expo initiated a rash of infrastructure projects, expanding Pudong airport and linking it with the Maglev train and five new subway lines. Inward investment has seen the population double to over 21 million people, attracted by new financial and service industries, expanded manufacturing (not least in fashion and textiles), and served by inner-city and suburban real estate developments and enhanced educational, leisure and cultural facilities. Museums, galleries, shopping malls and restored urban heritage have also brought Chinese and international tourists back to a city that seems to have re-discovered its cosmopolitan past.⁹

Rapid expansion has not come without a significant cost. In common with many other global cities, London and New York among them, the gulf between super-rich and poor has widened, the density of urban living has become oppressive, pollution has increased to unsustainable levels and political and financial corruption rather than meritocratic values appear to drive and taint innovation.¹⁰ But this is the story of urban development the world over, and in Shanghai’s case, the rise of China as a political and industrial super-power provides for compelling future scenarios. The usual story of inevitable decline, doesn’t quite fit here.¹¹ One might argue that the concerns of fashion are peripheral to this dramatic three-century narrative, but seen through the spectrum of ‘style’, a term familiar to the Shanghainese lexicon, the transition of a fishing village to a trading port, to an experiment for cosmopolitan internationalism, to an industrial powerhouse, to a political fulcrum, to a super-city, is a process made material and comprehensible through the clothes of its actors. As the chapters of this book demonstrate bodies and clothes are at the heart, not the periphery of those changes.

Shanghai in the World of Fashion

In an earlier collaboration on the meanings of fashion in the global city, my colleague David Gilbert opened the introduction to our edited collection of essays Fashion’s World Cities with some reflections on the emergence of Shanghai and Chinese fashion more generally into contemporary debates concerning global flows around fashion. He cited the millennial pledge of Shanghai’s mayor, Xu Kuangdi to build the city into the ‘world’s sixth fashion centre, alongside London, Paris, New York, Milan and Tokyo’ and the fashion-focused discussions that supported the siting of the World Expo in the city in 2010. But he also noted the faltering attempts to establish international fashion shows in Shanghai in the intervening period and the deeply ingrained prejudices of an international fashion community refusing to see China as anything other than a convenient source of cheap manufacturing and Western brand-obsessed consumers or an undercutting rival to luxury producers. In the end this disconnect lead us to conclude that Shanghai’s status as an aspirant world fashion city set it apart. David’s introduction concluded with the observation that ‘for all the efforts that its planners and politicians are taking to make Shanghai fit the mould of the fashion world city, this is the place where that mould is likely to be broken’.¹²

More than a decade later, following profound political, economic and technological change across the world, that prediction still holds fairly true. While Shanghai’s local fashion culture remains (as several chapters in this book argue) a vibrant and distinctive one, its values and textures are increasingly shared with mega-cities across the globe. Its intense sense of hyper-modernity produced through its hybrid cultural practices has also become almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, demarcating and pushing, as authors including Meng Yue and Alexander Des Forges have argued, at the city’s limits as a stable concept.¹³

At the same time, the certainties and characteristics that once defined the ‘classic’ world fashion cities of Paris, London, New York, Milan and Tokyo (a flexible manufacturing base, availability of specialist local production skills, proximity to respected fashion education institutes, developed media and promotional industries, a heritage of elite fashion production and consumption, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A Century of Chinese Printed Textiles in Shanghai
• 3 Wenming Xinzhuang (Civilized Costume)
• 4 Shanghai Qipao, 1925–49
• 5 ‘Through the Maloo to the City’: Fashion, Decadence and Dance Culture in Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century
• 6 Soong Ching-ling, Soong May-ling: Negotiating Dresses and Politics in Modern Shanghai, 1913–49
• 7 Image Makers of Fashionable Shanghai, 1910–30
• 8 Lost in Socialist Transformation? Shanghai Style under Mao
• 9 ‘New for three years, old for three years, fix for another three years’
• 10 The Shanghai Dandy: Men in the City
• 11 The Luxury Malling of Shanghai: Successes and Dissonances in the Chinese City
• 12 ‘There will never be a Chinese fashion’: Staking a Claim for Shanghai as a Fashion City
• Glossary
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright