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Conference Paper for Fashion: Exploring Critical Issues, Mansfield College,
Oxford, 25-27 Sept 2009.
Dr Sarah Cheang
London College of Fashion
A Chinese Dressing Jacket: China and Japan in British Modernity
Slide – ‘A Chinese Dressing Jacket’, Ladies’ Field, 14 November 1903
The title of my paper – A Chinese Dressing Jacket – refers to this image here – a
suggested garment for women to make at home, and contains an intriguing mixture of
Chinese, Japanese and British elements. In this paper, I‟d like to explore the
historically specific and geographically situated cultural resonances of this particular
design and others like it, and also examine the ways in which femininity intersected
with chinoiserie, japonaiserie, fashion and modernity in early twentieth-century
Britain through cultural cross-dressing. I will refer to Japanese dress and to Western
fashion design, but my main focus is on the wearing of Chinese garments and the
articulation of British femininities.
Museum collections and images from paintings, literature and magazines show that
both China and Japan had a presence in Western fashion in the early twentieth
century. Japanese elements had been appearing in European design from the late
1860s (Watanabe 1991), whilst the first three decades of the twentieth century saw a
resurgence of chinoiserie in the West (Cheang 2008); so this image stands at a
watershed moment between these two phases. And this is the case pretty much across
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Europe and in America and Australia, with, of course, important local variations
(which this paper cannot address today).
Slide – Théodore Roussel The Reading Girl (1886-7), George Hendrik Breitner
Girl in a White Kimono (1894), Claude Monet La Japonaise (1876)
Just to set the scene and give you a sense of what this all looked like in terms of
fashion and femininity, from the 1870s, artists began depicting young women wearing
Japanese kimono, as artistic dress, and as part of visual compositions in what is
termed japonisme. Kim