At last year’s National Day celebrations, the spotlight was on Taiwan’s First Lady Chow Mei-ching, who wore a rich brown satin Jason Wu dress, with gold embroidery round the hem. Just as Chow’s unique style embellished the National Day celebrations, the past century of Taiwanese fashion has embellished the beauty of Taiwan.
Early costume and national identity
Since the imposition of the Qing Manchu queue, Taiwanese dress has been mixed up with national identity. Yeh Le-chang, assistant professor at Shih Chien University’s Department of Fashion Design, explained that from the beginning of Japanese colonial rule in 1895, Taiwanese costume underwent three major transformations over 50 plus years.
The first was the appeasement approach during the Pacification era (1895-1919), promoting Western style dress, but allowing the Taiwanese to continue wearing Manchurian Qing costume.
“While the Taiwanese Westernized their clothes, they kept their queues until the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911,” Yeh said. “This was an extremely interesting period in the development of costume history when men’s costume Westernized much faster than women’s.”
During the Qing dynasty, Taiwanese women wore skirts formed of folded aprons, but by the late 1910s they had adopted western style tube skirts. Patterns on material were simplified, dropping the old auspicious symbols, such as phoenix, bat and peony. Large jin shan jackets with broad sleeves and wide bodies became a rarity as sleeves narrowed and upper garments lengthened and became more fitted.
The second phase of transformation was the Assimilation period (1919-1936). Large jin shan jackets gradually adopted flared sleeves, and by the 1930s the cheongsam came into fashion. “Taiwanese women did not wear this dress under the Qing. It was only once they were in vogue in Shanghai that the trend came to Japanese controlled Taiwan,” Yeh said.
The Japanese authorities did not take kindly to this fad. They actively enforced their desire for Taiwan to break ties with mainland China and adopt a Japanese national identity. School uniforms were a striking example of this. Yeh highlighted how uniforms from this period copied a Japanese model, girls wore bob haircuts and were taught Western style dress making. The Japanese hoped transforming a new generation’s perspective would prompt Westernization of dress code in Taiwan.
Taiwanese intellectuals, anxious of this development, began promoting the New Culture Movement and wearing Chinese style clothes to preserve their traditions. Families closely connected to the Japanese, on the other hand, expressed affinity with the colonial authorities by wearing the Japanese costume, meticulously donning a kimono when meeting with Japanese people. More avant-garde households would wear fashionable western clothes.
For a time post-1936, the Japanese authorities tried unsuccessfully to promote the kimono in Taiwan. “Kimonos were too expensive for common use and highly impractical for warfare,” Yeh said. “The Japanese government later promoted more modern garb, standardizing designs where women wore bloomers and men wore national dress.”
When the Nationalist government relocated to Taiwan, costume was once again linked to national identity. Wishing to eradicate the legacy of colonization, the Nationalists prohibited the wearing of Japanese clogs and military uniforms. In 1949 over 2 million people retreated to Taiwan with the Nationalist government, and their clothing was mainly for the convenience of fleeing.
Eighty-two-year-old Zhang Hua smilingly reminisced that while the men who had retreated to Taiwan from mainland China mostly wore military uniforms, the women wore elegant and simple cheongsam in blue and other solid colors. However, the tailoring was shoddy and the materials of poor quality, Zhang said.
Taiwanese people meanwhile wore native cotton jackets and trousers. With the arrival of American aid and the flour ration, “many people made the flour sacks into trousers, which still had ‘China-USA Cooperation’ written up the back of the trouser leg,” Zhang said.
Chairman of the Taiwan Textiles Research Institute Wang Yea-kang pointed out that during this period many textile producers retreated to Taiwan with the Nationalist government, for example, Vivian Wu of Tai Yuen Textiles Co. Ltd. and Hsu Yu-ziang of Far Eastern Textiles. They began with cotton spinning, producing mostly white cotton. With no dyes yet available people made do with off-white and khaki cotton clothes, according to Wang.
Rise of the textile industry: diversification of fashions
Following the boost to the textile industry from K. Y. Yin’s foreign trade policies in the 1960s, dying technology gradually came to Taiwan. “This period saw the beautification of fabrics and a proliferation of colors and styles,” Wang said.
The 1960s witnessed major changes in Taiwanese costume history. First of all, Dawa News held Taiwan’s first beauty pageant, with the contestants sporting the latest trends. The rise of the textile industry also saw industry professionals organizing contests such as The Empress of Sweaters. The second major change was the advent of television, which in a way helped propagate fashion consciousness. Viewers saw fashion guru Eliza Wang’s first ever program teaching women to make their own clothes, and modern fashion shows with models taking to the catwalk on TV.
The third change was the founding of Shih Chien College, today’s Shih Chien University, which offered Taiwan’s first costume design course, giving its students a solid foundation in fashion. Then there was the completion of Chung Hua Market and First Department Store, which coincided with a growing economy and a consequential increase in consumer spending. Finally, the introduction of Hong Kong cinema, including Shaw Brothers films, pictorials and similar publications into Taiwan all had a profound impact on the local fashion scene.
“Boutiques mushroomed around ports such as Keelung, selling goods brought home by sailors from abroad,” Yeh said, adding that exhibitions would also invite beautiful young women to strut their stuff, modeling and marketing the latest fashion.
The miniskirt and hippie fashions arrived in Taiwan in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The latter were most apparent in long hair and an alternative dress sense. Concerned that these trends would have a subversive influence on society, the police would send men with long hair to a barber and force them to get it cut. Also, television shows could not feature actors dressed in alternative styles.
This period of prosperity was jeopardized by the second oil crisis, a crucial turning point for the fashion and textiles industries. There was a swathe of bankruptcies among European and American buyers of Taiwanese-made clothing. Yeh recalled that “popular markets were filled with these cheap returned exports, but they were all a size too big so had to be taken home and modified.” The government and the textile industry realized then that they had to rethink their strategies.
The brand explosion
In the 1980s the Bureau of Foreign Trade encouraged designers to incorporate their names directly onto their products. Hsu Li-lin’s appointment as CEO of Sunrise Department Stores, with her background in design, led to the rise of clothing designers such as Chen Tsai-hsia, Isabelle Wen, Jamei Chen and Lu Fong-chih. Their careers took off through Hsu’s promotion of Taiwanese brands. To distinguish themselves from their western counterparts, a number of these designers tried to inject a Taiwanese rustic chic into their work.
Films adapted from the works of novelist Chiung Yao had a substantial influence on fashion, through the wardrobe of characters, most notably the flared trousers. With the rise of feminism, women started wearing stylish suits but flares remained popular. A diverse range of styles could be seen as well, such as designer dress, local garments, western influenced suits and a trend for wearing shirts with the collar turned up.
The 1990s saw the rise of sensuality. “Revealing clothing had always been taboo, but after 1995 sensuality became acceptable in fashion. Clothing was liberated, people were willing to show off their bodies and tattoos came into fashion,” Yeh said. In recent years the supermodel industry has thrived, with personalities such as Lin Chi-ling leading the fashion world with their daring and striking outfits.
Most recently, Japanese and Korean TV dramas have brought their distinctive fashion styles into the limelight. At the same time people fight tooth and nail for the latest European and American top designer ware, and the opening of Japan’s Uniqlo chain in Taiwan has been a real hot topic. On top of all this, Taiwanese designers are now standing firmly on the world stage with more of them opening branches abroad and joining fashion shows in London and Paris. The last century has seen a prolific flowering of fashions, gradually spreading and taking root in every corner of the world. (MM-HZW)
(This article originally appeared in the China Times Jan. 10.)