Valery Garrett has spent a couple of decades writing about the history of Guangdong ... and about clothing. A British fashion designer, she taught at the Hong Kong Polytechnic, listing among her students Vivienne Tam. Garrett's interest in Chinese fashion began in the 1970s when she started collecting mandarin squares, the name given to badges worn by mandarins during the Qing dynasty. 'I used to haunt all the dealers in Hollywood Road and gradually filled a wall with them,' she says. That pursuit developed into a career for the designer, who became an authority on Chinese clothing, publishing many books on Chinese dress and textiles. The newly released Chinese Dress: From the Qing Dynasty to the Present, is Garrett's latest. When she began teaching at the Polytechnic, Garrett used to visit the New Territories during the summer break because of her interest in traditional Chinese dress. 'So I took my camera and notebook and went to some of the market towns like Fanling and Sheung Shui and just watched the villagers,' she recalls. 'Some had come over the border and wore very traditional dress. There were also the villagers from the farming and fishing communities. I could see the kind of hats they wore, the patterned bands and the aprons.' In autumn 1978, she persuaded the Polytechnic to give her some spare time and hired a Hakka translator. Together, they targeted villages, especially those in closed areas where permits were needed, because she felt they were the least influenced by western fashions. That year Garrett began to buy items of traditional clothing, including baby slings, children's wear, adults' hats, bands, shoes and aprons, among many other items. 'You could tell by the apron which ethnic group they came from, whether they were local Cantonese, Hakka, Hoklo or Tanka, the fishing people. Similarly, with patterned bands, you could tell a woman's marital status by the patterns she used. So I amassed quite a collection,' she says. That collection was later sold to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. With Chinese Dress, Garrett was able to put together another display: it features about 500 prints, including photos of beautifully embroidered wedding gowns and mandarin's rank badges. The first four chapters cover the Qing dynasty from the 17th century to its demise in 1911. The second part covers the 20th century from the Republican period of 1912-49; then follows what Garrett calls the New China period of 1950 to today. The book is as much a social and historical commentary as an examination of what was in vogue. 'The Qing dynasty was governed by the Manchu, who lived on the other side of the Great Wall and conquered China in 1644,' says Garrett. 'Because they were a semi-nomadic race they continued with some of those customs. They made the Chinese population wear the queue, which resembled a horse's tail. The cuffs on the dragon robes were called horse-hoof cuffs, which covered the hands for when they rode into the cold wind.' The imperial court laid down rules on what a person could wear. The emperor wore yellow and the five-clawed dragon on his robe. The male relatives wore different shades of yellow; the mandarins - government officials who could be Manchu or Chinese - wore dark blue. Others could wear five-clawed dragons if the emperor particularly liked them. The rest of the population had to have four claws. 'So the idea was you could tell at a glance what rank that person had,' says Garrett. Within the middle class, the women wore extremely bulky embroidered jackets and pleated skirts. They were huge. 'When you look at the size of these jackets you're amazed because it would take three Caucasians of average size to fit into one of these,' says Garrett. 'The bigger they were, the wealthier the family, based on the amount of silk used. These very large robes with loads of embroidery were very time-consuming to produce, but indicated at a glance how important you were.' Early forms of mousse and hair gel included a 'jelly-like' liquid that women would apply to their hair, along with a liberal application of cosmetics to their face. This liquid - called wu-mo or pau-hua-mo - was made from shavings of wood steeped in water and then applied to the hair to force it into the style of the region. The stiff hair would then be adorned with hairpins made of gold, enamel, silver, or semi-precious stones including jade and coral, and designed in the shape of a bird, or insects such as butterflies. The jackets were impractical to move around in. But fashion has never been about ease, as Garrett indicates. Spare a thought for those millions of Chinese girls whose feet were bound - in fact, crushed - for fashion any time between the ages of three and 12. That particular 'style' was banned in 1912 but still took decades to die out. Besides the Mao suit, the most iconic item of Chinese dress is the cheongsam. Garrett remarks on a photograph of Pu Yi, the last emperor, who in the initial years after the dynasty's overthrow in 1911 was allowed to remain in the Forbidden City. 'It's 1929 and Pu Yi is surrounded by his sisters, all wearing the cheongsam, which had just become fashionable in Shanghai,' she says. 'You have to remember that 18 years before that they wore dragon robes and clothes that hadn't changed for 300 years - then in that short period everything changed. 'China was opening up to the west, which had an effect on clothing, which slimmed down. Sleeves became narrow, clothes started to follow the lines of the body; suddenly the cheongsam evolved. Women started to show off the curves of their bodies for the first time and it was really quite scandalous. Only the most fashionable women wore the cheongsam,' Garrett says. Today, traditional dress and the Mao suit are worn mostly by members of older generations and those living in remote areas on the mainland. But Garrett writes: 'Nostalgia is beginning its own revolution, with products and styles from the early communist era to the Cultural Revolution being highly fashionable for the younger generation.' And still, at Lunar New Year, she adds, all over China 'families look back to their roots and proudly dress their children in colourful replicas of traditional styles from the Qing dynasty'. Chinese Dress: From the Qing Dynasty to the Present, by Valery Garrett (Tuttle Publishing, HK$550)
