In Taiwan, some of the cutting is done by local critics and by visiting Westerners, who see lack of sartorial taste everywhere: women in their forties wearing Alice-in-Wonderland ruffled blouses and dresses, and men in intensely uncoordinated suits with checks and stripes contending with contrasting colors. Where are the standards? Why are local tastes so un-Vogue, so un-GQ?
There are reasons. Taiwan is just emerging from a fashion time-warp born of economics. There is much catching up to do. For instance, the streets are still jammed with school students and employees wearing required uniforms seemingly designed by retired master sergeants. From primary school, to military service, to the work place, the decision about what to wear has often been a simple one: Which uniform is clean?
For many people, sartorial choices have been a response not to peer pressure, but to fiat. Since school and work days often extend into mid-evening or later, and weekends last a day and a half at best, there has not been much opportunity to wear clothes chosen by personal preference. It is difficult to gain experience with coordinating colors, selecting accessories, and experimenting with personal styles when individuality is measured at best by the length of a skirt or the way one crushes his uniform cap.
The four-decade-old uniform policy represents a larger economic story; it was not established just to remind everyone to be on guard against a communist invasion from across the Taiwan Straits. Uniforms blurred income and status variations among students and workers, and they helped save face for countless families, urban and rural, who were eking out an existence in the tough years after World War II. Even though the island rapidly transformed its economy, up to a decade ago the world of international fashion was still a luxury curtailed for most shoppers by economic factors, including limited disposable income.
But now the economic scene is greatly changed. There is more money to spend, and overseas travel and the expanding availability of domestic and international fashion media have helped stimulate rising levels of expectations about personal lifestyles. As a result, attitudes about fashion are being radically retooled.
Educating attitudes is nevertheless a slow process. What looks good on a fashion model in Vogue does not necessarily work on the streets of Taipei, but at least the styles do convey a sophisticated grasp of color combinations that can be applied to dress styles anywhere.
Oftentimes, the problem is knowing when to stop, that sense of discipline about the number of colors and accessories that can go together without being busy. When it comes to color and ornamentation in women's clothes, more is still considered better. For example, a woman's taste falls short when she appears at the office wearing a gray herring bone tweed jacket over a clean-lined red dress-and black nylons decorated with scores of small, pink butterflies. Close, but not quite. International high fashion is closer to the clean, disciplined lines and colors of Sung dynasty porcelains, not the busy complexity of design on Manchu pottery.
The interesting complexity about Taiwan's fashion scene is that there is a severe shortage of role models. Government and educational leaders, business figures, media personalities-few people in any of these high-visibility categories convey a sense of taste along international lines. And fashions appear to be the least of their concerns. For example, there is little perception of work clothes as an indication of professionalism and performance. Thus, people still show up for job interviews wearing clothes that would automatically disqualify them from consideration in the U.S. or Europe.
Adapting international styles to the local scene is not necessarily an easy task. The shift from what works in New York, Milan, or Paris is complicated by several factors. The local sense of style, after all, must take into consideration the island's semitropical environment during the summer and its often cold, windy, and damp winters. In Taiwan, no less than in Hawaii or Phoenix, shoppers must take climatic and cultural dimensions into consideration when choosing clothes. Muumuus work in one place, Indian jewelry and bolo ties in another, chi pao in yet another, but they would all look out of place on Wall Street.
Although Taiwan's serious fashion designers would prefer that their own sophisticated designs for the international market could sell as well domestically, they will have to wait. Just as the school uniform policy still remains relatively unchanged, the early stage of fashion experimentation has not moved much beyond the wild side.
At least there is a happy side to all of this. Most people are still free of the tyrannies of peer pressure on dress, a source of stress for all ages in other societies. While the future may well bring international standards of fashion to a broader swath of Taiwan society, today the search for style is just getting under way. There is still an extraordinary range of tastes. No matter. It makes people watching much more interesting. •