Jewelry Design of the "Six Etiquettes"
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2020 Artistic Design, Communication and Engineering Science Jewelry Design of the "Six Etiquettes" Tingting Wang, Lingling Liu College of Arts, Guilin University of Technology, Guilin 541004, China Abstract: This paper primarily studies the application of the "six etiquettes" of Chinese traditional wedding custom in jewelry design. For the past few years, the demand for traditional clothing which is named as Hanfu has increased rapidly with the prosperity of traditional clothing. This phenomenon also promotes the development of related industries, such as Hanfu wedding. Because of the love of traditional culture, many young people choose Hanfu wedding. Hanfu wedding is held according to the wedding ceremony that is recorded in historical books, like the Zhou system or Tang system. In the meantime, the Hanfu wedding naturally can not lack the suitable jewelry. "Six etiquettes" is a traditional marriage custom in China and it has been used since Zhou dynasty. It is the complete embodiment from the pledge in love to the marriage, which contains propose a marriage, ask name, divine, send betrothal presents, discuss the wedding date and greet bride personally. This paper takes the "six etiquettes " in traditional culture as the source of inspiration, extracts the elements which includes special meanings, and designs wedding jewelry with modern aesthetics. Keywords: Jewelry design; Six etiquettes; Hanfu wedding; Wild goose; Deer 1 Introduction 1.1 Background and Main Contents For the past few years, traditional culture is so inviting that has caused national elements hot, such as the well-known cultural creation of the Palace Museum. Meanwhile, the traditional clothing which is named as Hanfu begins to show charm in the pluralistic stage. The hot of national elements and Hanfu makes us pay more attention to our traditional culture, and more and more young people are fond of them. The prosperity of traditional culture also promotes the development of other industries, like Hanfu wedding. The increasing number of young people choose Chinese traditional wedding, and the demand for marriage decorations with traditional characteristics is gradually increasing. The combination of traditional culture and wedding jewelry will meet the needs of the public well. 1.2 The Thought of Current Situation and Design in Chinese Traditional Wedding Jewelry The industry of jewelry in China is huge, and one of the greatest selling points of jewelry is marriage jewelry. For example, each gentleman can only customize one diamond ring of DR, and 128 https://doi.org/10.37420/icaces.2020.017 gives it to the only lover in this life. The bracelet with nine treasures in Chow Tai Fook is designed by combining Chinese traditional wedding customs and extracting the most representative moral of luck and wealth. As you can see, the reason why wedding jewelry has excellent selling points is that it not only has beautiful shape but also implies profound meaning. No matter how many kinds of jewelry there are, it will never escape the word "love". People give all the blessings and wishes for marriage and love to jewelry and present it to the lover. Extracting elements from the "six etiquettes " wedding custom to design wedding jewelry which contains beautiful meaning is the combination of wedding culture and wedding jewelry. The excellent jewelry works that are created by this way also improve people's cognition of traditional culture. Based on the online survey and relevant literature, the main customers who are fond of Hanfu and have a greater demand for Hanfu wedding jewelry are young people and mostly are women. For young women, we design a modern wedding jewelry with traditional shape. 2 Wedding Jewelry Design with Six Etiquettes 2.1 The Investigation of Six Etiquettes "Six etiquettes" is a traditional marriage etiquette in China. During the Western Zhou dynasty, the marriage was basically carried out by following the system of "six etiquettes". "Six etiquettes" is a process that includes a series of etiquettes and customs. According to the regulations, the wedding is complete only it finishes proposing a marriage, asking name, divination, sending betrothal presents, discussing the wedding date and greeting bride personally. Proposing a marriage is to visit to the lady's family to seek a marriage alliance. The book which is named Ceremony describes the circumstances of proposing a marriage, it is said that the bridegroom should use wild goose. The "wild goose" is used as a gift, because it only spouses once in its life. The gift expresses the loyalty to the marriage and symbolizes the same mind of couple. Figure 1 Wild Goose Asking name is to inquire the woman's last name and birth date in order to avoid marriage with the same surname and divine. It is usually carried out with proposing a marriage. Divination is carried out after asking name. It is described in the Book of Songs, Folk Songs of Wei and the Common People that the divination is good and the dowry will be taken away by bridegroom’s carriage. The result of divination in Zhou dynasty is significance. Every couple is supposed to divine to predict the marriage, which also showed that people had a very prudent attitude 129 2020 Artistic Design, Communication and Engineering Science towards marriage at that time. Divination is a mode to test good or ill luck, and people always use tortoise shell or milfoil to make predictions. Figure 2 Tortoise Shell Figure 3 Milfoil Sending betrothal presents is the betrothal gifts that is provided by bridegroom. The betrothal presents that are provided by common people are not more than five pure silks. Scholar would give red or black textiles, a bunch of silk and deer skin while the feudal princes and the emperor will add two special kinds of jades. The deer skin represents the meaning of good luck. The whole deer was provided before that, but it was too troublesome. In some places, there were no deer, so a deer- like animal was caught instead. People would roll up a long silk from both sides to the middle and regarded it as a bunch, a bunch of silk which is one hundred cubits in length is a bolt of cloth. Two special kinds of jades are ritual jades, and the feudal princes and the emperor used them to get married. Figure 4 Jade in the shape of a deer in Shang and Zhou dynasty. Discussing the wedding date is the final consultation at the bride’s home after the bridegroom chooses the wedding date. Greeting bride personally is the step that the bridegroom goes to the bride's home in person to marry the bride. The book which is named Ceremony describes the circumstances of proposing a marriage, it is said that the couple will take an ink wagon and hold a candle in hand to lighten the road. In the pre-Qin dynasty, a carriage was used for greeting the bride, but bridal sedan chair was used instead since the Song dynasty. After greeting the bride, they will eat and drink together in order to become husband and wife. The wine set is bottle gourd which is split into two gourds and tied with a red line. The whole set of procedures is very special and has strong cultural connotation, which fully 130 https://doi.org/10.37420/icaces.2020.017 reflects the importance of marriage. Figure 5 A carriage in pre-Qin dynasty Figure 6 Wine set for marriage 2.2 Market Investigation of Wedding Jewelry We conducted investigation and analysis on the wedding jewelry of foreign famous brands like Van Cleef & Arpels, Chaumet, Bulgari, Bosilong, Tiffany, Swarovski, and domestic well-known brands such as Chow Sang Sang, Lukfook Jewellery, Chow Tai Fook, LaoFengXiang, China Gold, Millennium Star and Lamchiu Golden. On the market, the usual jewelry materials are gold, silver and platinum. Through the analysis of the products which are in the market, rings and mainly diamond rings are the main foreign wedding jewelry. Influenced by foreign culture, most weddings in domestic are western-style or western-style weddings with Chinese characteristics. Wedding jewelry is also under the influence of foreign countries, and diamond rings are used for both engagement and marriage in China. Markets are diversified in China, some merchants do not ignore the tradition when Figure 7 Criss-cross Analysis 131 2020 Artistic Design, Communication and Engineering Science pay attention to the western-style romance. They made a lot of innovative design for wedding jewelry in Chinese style, especially Chow Sang Sang, Lukfook Jewellery, Chow Tai Fook and LaoFengXiang. The jewelry not only keeps the characteristic of Chinese style but also has the concision in western- style, and the mostly material is gold. 2.3 Scheme of Drawing and Design After the analysis by looking up lots of data and doing mind mapping, we get some elements that can be used to design. By taking advantage of those elements, we start to conceive and try to make a rough drawing. After the filtrating of the rough drawing, we choose a possible scheme to deeply draw, and select a uniform style which is more suitable for the wedding. And on this basis, we conduct a series of designs to create a set of wedding jewelry. Figure 8 Rough Drawing 1 Figure 9 Rough Drawing 2 Figure 10 Rough Drawing 3 Figure 11 Rough Drawing 4 3 The Implementation of Scheme 3.1 The Final Design Figure 12 The overall design sketch of jewelry 132 https://doi.org/10.37420/icaces.2020.017 Figure 13 Front view of ring Figure 14 Surface view of ring Taking the wild goose as a gift and holding the wild goose to seek a marriage alliance is the design sources of the ring (Fig.