A friend in Singapore did a double take when he saw a middle-aged “auntie” in goth get-up, complete with red hair and slashed black leggings, going about her business in one of the city-state’s ubiquitous hawker centres. But hey, as long as she’s doing no harm, we say live and let live.
It may come as a surprise to many that China had its own version of goth fashion. Far from being a subculture on the fringes of society, this look was so popular among women in the Tang dynasty that poet Bai Juyi (772-846) wrote a cheeky verse about it. The poem,
Shishi zhuang, which begs to be translated as “vogue”, describes the fashionable woman of the Yuanhe reign period (806-820): her hair was coiled into a chignon on top of her head, and she wore no hair ornaments; her face was left nude with no foundation, no powder and no rouge on the cheeks; eyebrows were drawn slanting down both sides, resembling the Chinese character for “eight” (
); and the must-have on her dressing table was a dark cream that she dabbed on her lips to colour them black. Bai described the completed face as one on the verge of tears. Chinese women were still wearing this funereal look well into the subsequent Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period (907-979).
