On Their Dress They Wore a Body. Fashion and Identity in Late Qing

On Their Dress They Wore a Body: Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai Paola Zamperini Going Somatic And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. —Genesis, 3.7 One needs a semiotics of bodily adornment and personal accessory in order to know people: what Balzac calls “la vestignomie” has become “almost a branch of the art created by Gall and Lavater.”—Peter Brooks, Body Work In many cultures undressing—oneself and others—is considered a very erotic and enticing activity. The present essay, however, argues that leav- ing someone’s clothes on can be just as interesting and titillating—at least within the context of academic research.1 Thus it is centered on fictional representations of clothed bodies and fashion in Shanghai within the realm of late Qing literary production.2 As it will become clear from the following positions 11:2 © 2003 by Duke University Press positions 11:2 Fall 2003 302 discussion, in vernacular novels written between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, clothes do much more than simply cover fictional bodies. They also constitute their social, gender, national, and racial identities. Focusing on the dialectic relationship between the body, clothing, and identity will help us to unravel the imaginary of a very interesting group of writers in one of the most fascinating junctures in Chinese literature and history.3 In the past twenty years, the scholarship produced about fashion and the body in many different fields has shown that in any given culture, fabricating a dress and wearing it simultaneously define the body as a cultural artifact.4 In other words, we cannot think about clothes without thinking about the body underneath, and we cannot see the body without thinking about the clothes. This finding becomes particularly relevant when we look at late Qing novels. Who (man, woman, Chinese, foreigner, young, old, rich, poor, and so on) gets to wear what, how, at what price, where, and why are issues that seem to weigh on the minds of the writers of this period. Thus, in the present investigation we will “go somatic,” meaning that we will look at the guises in which writers clothe their characters and the types of social and bodily knowledge they engender and mirror, as well as the emotional and cultural investments of the society that produced them. Within the context of Chinese tradition, clothing is the marker not of sin, as the above quote from the Bible illustrates, but of “Civilization.” It is what distinguishes man from beast, Chinese from barbarian.5 Thus the moral implications in the Chinese case are just as urgent but of a degree different from the case of the Bible. The body must be covered not to prevent it from sinning but in order to reveal its “Chineseness,” ergo, its superiority vis-à-vis the outsiders. What is at stake is not just the moral status of an individual, marked in any event in his or her flesh by the original sin, but rather the collective superiority of the Chinese nation as embodied in the clothed appearance of one of its citizens. This concern with bodily surfaces and their meanings is echoed in traditional medical conceptions of the body. In The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine, Shigeisa Kuriyama shows how traditional Chinese medicine, from very early on, mapped the body as spatial layering. In other words, the medical view of the body was structured by the logic of depth.6 That adds Zamperini Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai 303 importance to clothes; almost before one’s skin, they constitute the first level of a layered body. Given that for many a century the basic shape of Chinese clothing did not change in any significant way, the way one’s dress or clothing was worn could reveal important details about a person. To borrow Erasmus’s words, indeed clothing was “the body’s body,” and from it one might infer the state of a person’s character.7 Thus it is no surprise that most Chinese fiction writers took pains to pro- vide their readers with detailed descriptions of their characters’ clothing and apparel. There is no question that one of their primary intents was to present to their readers a clearer picture of the characters’ physical appearance. But they also clearly believed in the power of clothes to reveal moral orienta- tion and cultivation (or lack thereof ), besides social status, gender, and class. From a close study of the Ming and Qing vernacular sources, it becomes apparent that an interesting change occurs in the literary production of the second half of the nineteenth century, change that makes it significant to separate these sources from earlier ones.8 Late Qing authors still invested the body and its clothes with many of its previous meanings (such as that of being a microcosm that must be in accordance with the macrocosm, whose clothing must match status and gender, and so on). Yet they also make it more problematic. Clothes start marking the time of the body and of the society in which it operates. For the first time in Chinese fiction, dresses reveal the time and the space in which the characters move. Fashion(s) and clothing thus become one of the sites where a new problematic social identity and its “discontents” are displayed and negotiated. Also, for the first time we see characters discarding Chinese clothing to wear Western clothes; the implications of this act will be elaborated upon presently.9 The background of this sartorial web of desire, consumption, and passion is, again for the first time, Shanghai. The treaty port where East met West on a daily basis, fictional Shanghai is depicted as a veritable modern metropolis, with its fast vehicles, its electric lights, its foreign crowds, and its movie theaters and cinemas. All these real-life innovations produce the “shop-window effect” that makes Shanghai immensely “storied” and thus the ideal arena for novelistic plots. Late Qing Shanghai may not be the polit- ical and administrative capital of the empire, but in the novels of the period it is the capital of fashion, the Paris of the East, where looks matter more than positions 11:2 Fall 2003 304 substance. Both in real life and in fiction, Shanghai is where the trendiest tailors open up shop and looks are created. In particular, the “Shanghai look” circulates as an object of desire as well as of ridicule through the pages of these texts.10 Late Qing writers, innovative as they are in making their novels contem- porary, are even more so in introducing the notion of fashion as intrinsic to many of their characters’ identity. In fictional Shanghai, one’s look matters— first and foremost, for the pleasure of the reader, who, not unlike Walter Benjamin’s flaneur, can stroll alongside the characters, window-shopping, as it were, their lifestyles, their attires, and their stories. Novels help readers in the whole of China to catch a literary glimpse of a world that, at the time, is for many Chinese just a futuristic vision or a metropolitan nightmare. But there is more at stake. In Shanghai, where the booming leisure culture keeps creating new jobs and new social rituals, looking trendy is often the key to one’s survival. This is clearly illustrated in the case of courtesans, Shanghai’s “working girls,” who, as the trendsetters, compete to be innovative and original in fashion (fig. 1).11 In Jiuweihu,HuBaoyu is a good example of the importance of fashion and clothing for courtesans.12 Portrayed as a nymphomaniac who consumes one man after another, and by no means the most beautiful courtesan of Shanghai, she owes her success to the fact that she always knows how to make clothes work for her.13 For instance, intrigued by the idea of having a foreign lover, Hu Baoyu enlists the help of the “salt water sisters.”14 She copies their unusual hairdos, and soon everybody in Shanghai is sporting Hu Baoyu’s “new” hairstyle, from the hottest courtesans in town to women of good households. The foreign look includes her learning some English, changing all her furniture, and buying only foreign things.15 When we are given descriptions of her dresses, we see how her sartorial practices reveal not only her physical charms but also her market strategy: “Hu Baoyu’s dress this evening was different from those of the other pros- titutes. Her whole body was sheathed in bright red satin embroidered with golden flowers inlaid with small crystal mirrors.”16 In other words, her at- tire is blinding, beautiful, and exotic all at once. The author tells us that she chooses this very fashionable dress because she wants to catch the eye (and the purse) of a very powerful and rich man who is there. Thus she uses Zamperini Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai 305 Figure 1 Late Qing courtesan. Collection of Paola Zamperini clothing not only as a marker of her profession but also as an ad, and by so doing she wears her body—her wares—on her dress. The importance of the “Shanghai look” as a “tool of the trade” for the courtesan becomes even more apparent when Hu Baoyu goes to Beijing to improve her financial situation. Clothes like hers, in the latest style from Shanghai, have never been seen on the streets of Beijing, so when she goes by, everybody notices her and cheers her as if they were watching a play.17 Indeed, when Hu Baoyu enters the positions 11:2 Fall 2003 306 theater, people stop watching the play and look at her.

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