For decades, one of Hong Kong's most ubiquitous sights was the cheongsam. Visitors to Hong Kong - especially male visitors of a certain age - still expect to see local women clad in figure-hugging Chinese dresses. But like bat-winged junks on the harbour, safari suits and rickshaws, the trademark cheong-sam has largely vanished.
The dress was only widely worn in the 1920s. At that time, it was popularly known as a 'Shanghai dress', as it experienced its first surge of popularity in that city. From Shanghai, the fashion trend rapidly spread throughout the Chinese world, and by the late 1930s, it was a common sight from Penang in Malaysia to Hong Kong and further afield.
A mark of modernity, the cheongsam elegantly symbolised the growing liberation of women that followed the establishment of the Republic of China, in 1912.
It's worth remembering that the cheongsam was as much a status symbol as a fashion choice. Coolie and peasant women would not be caught dead in them, as they favoured more practical trousers.
One of my late elderly family friends, Auntie Cissy, who never wore anything but a cheongsam, would smile witheringly and roll her eyes when asked if she owned any slacks. She said trousers were only for amahs, or helpers. True to her word, when she died, she left behind wardrobes full of superbly cut cheongsams, many of them decades old.
Beyond class markers, some local women in Hong Kong today wear the cheongsam as a cultural statement. It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that, as older photographs attest, former chief secretary Anson Chan Fang On-sang dressed in contemporary Western fashions early in her civil-service career before switching to the habit of donning the well-tailored cheongsam. Many of her female colleagues did the same.