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Antonia Finnane, How to Make a Mao Suit: Clothing the People of Communist China, 1949–1976, Cambridge University Press, 2023. 386 pgs.
Here is a rare, exciting academic book that with every page makes you look with greater attention at all the little things taken for granted in our lives. How much thought have most of us ever given to buttonholes? Or to pins, or needles? To thread, or the shape of shears? And especially, to the people whose fingers handle all of these?
In How to Make a Mao Suit: Clothing the People of Communist China, 1949–1976, Antonia Finnane makes us think on just that, and a whole lot more. Clothing, and fashion, as she points out, has often been seen as a minor research interest, partly because it is frequently associated with women (even if clothes are worn and loved by everyone, attachment to them somehow seen as a purely feminine weakness, hence, a frivolity). But the more in-depth we look at it, the more closely we can see how foundational dress is. Through dress, and through those who have made the clothes people wear at different points in history, we can observe the changing dynamics of society, gender roles, the economy, and the means of production. In the case of this study, we can also glimpse at the endlessly fraught and fascinating everyday lives of people who were trying to negotiate the epochal changes brought about by the Chinese Communist revolution, its sudden shortages and the heavy demands made on women’s time to cut and sew clothes for the whole family. The establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 brought about, as Finnane points out, a kind of sartorial upheaval that had been common in other dynastical changes, imposing a transformation of dress that was also meant to show that people now belonged to a new order.
The book looks at the most common garments of the new era. Apart from a few peasant jackets—which still kept a more traditional pattern, sewn without seams on the shoulders or arms—the zhifu (制服), a variation of the Zhongshan suit, (which became known in English as the Mao suit,) was paramount. Even if it had already been introduced during the brief Republican period (1912–1949), the Mao suit became the hallmark of the era, emphasising the masculinity of the new order, and in so doing pushing Chinese women off the public scene on which they had only briefly appeared. Severe and without frills as it looks, it is a type of suit that requires a number of sewing skills that were new to the traditional Chinese tailor—like setting the sleeves into the armscye, or stitching buttonholes (a finnicky and lengthy process when done by hand, which requires a good mastery of the needle) and also measuring and fitting a more form-fitting garment compared to Chinese-style tunics and jackets. Sewing technology also had to be adapted: pins, for example, had not been used by Chinese tailors, as, historically, pieces of fabric were provisionally held together before stitching by using a paste. Tailors and seamstresses took time warming to pins, but buttons were embraced more rapidly. Generally speaking, the predominance of the zhifu imposed Western tailoring techniques and tools, displacing older forms of making clothes in the Chinese style, including the long stitch that characterised the more traditional sewing style.
The introduction of the zhifu as the main form of accepted dress, through some of the most dramatic and distressing times of modern Chinese history, didn’t just involve the need to follow Mao’s sartorial choices, but also a number of practical steps that saw, among other things, the introduction in Chinese homes of the sewing machine (one of the most coveted consumer items in the Mao era), the fascinatingly revelatory publication of pattern books, and the frequent scramble to get hold of thread, needles, and cloth, as disastrous economic policies created all kind of penuries. The labour imposed on women was considerable (and the desirability of a sewing machine all too understandable): “in 1956 only 20% of new clothes in Shanghai were bought ready-made. The proportion rose over time, but by 1975 it was still well under 50%,” Finnane says.
As absolutely everything was political in Mao’s China, having mastered Western-style sewing skills early on was not without its problems either—in the initial part of the volume, Finnane recounts the story of the Red Group Tailors, a group of tailors hailing from Ningbo who had settled in Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin and Yokohama. They mostly made Western-style suits, starting from the late Qing (1636–1911) and consolidating their renown in the Republican era. The name apparently came from the fact that they were tailoring suits in the Western style, including for foreign diplomats, and foreigners at the time were called hongmao or red-haired. The Red Group Tailors had particularly fine skills and good entrepreneurship, building a name for themselves in the cities and countries in which they operated (Sun Yat-sen himself had his own suit in Yokohama made by a Red Group tailor). Interestingly then for a type of suit that was going to represent China in its renewed national glory, the zhifu has its origins in Japanese adaptation of Western military uniforms, although the exact origin is disputed between different tailor shops, but all linked to Japanese uniforms. After 1949, as anything foreign-connected came under scrutiny, many Red Group tailors had to leave China, and some settled in Hong Kong, where they started making cheongsams and Western suits.
Finnane’s chapters on pattern books, one of the most fascinating sections of a fascinating book, shows how the type of morality imposed during the Mao era (not that he was an exceedingly moral man himself) created such a taboo about women’s bodies that even instructions on how to take measurements in order to cut a dress to size went to great lengths to avoid having to deal with the female form, and its physical characteristics. The illustrations throughout the book are one of its many delights, in particular those that show these very pattern books trying to come up with ways to address, as little as possible, how to take a woman’s measurements. In one instance, I kept staring at a particularly weird image that has two floating hands around the drawing of a woman—which, Finnane explains, were the disembodied hands of the tailor measuring out, to avoid even the possibility of the idea of actually touching a woman. In other instances, out of a series of drawn figures in which different types of male bodies are represented in line—slouching, with smaller shoulders or a larger belly—only one female body is allowed to squeeze in, with breasts drawn so small and low as if they were embarrassingly trying to disappear by running away to the bottom of the page. As any other printed text of the time, even pattern books had a strong pedagogical intent, and a very limited range of possibilities: the zhifu was presented in a number of smaller variations, there was room for children clothes, and, very occasionally, also for a more cheerful woman’s frock, according to the year of publication and the latest political campaigns being waged on Chinese people. But, as Finnane writes, “In circumstances where the only legitimate love objects were Mao and the Party, sexualised clothing was a problem,” one which was solved by eliminating women from the page.
Even if next to invisible in pattern books, and on the political scene, women entered the tailoring industry only at this time, as cutting and sewing cloth together was seen as a gendered occupation that suited women. They could and should sew, but not be too visible. In the 1950s, when prostitutes were sent to reform programmes, they were often taught how to sew on a machine, or how to operate sock-knitting machines and mechanised weaving looms. Still, model workers were male: in 1960, Cao Guanfu was celebrated for having made 750,000 sleeves without having his sewing machine break down (who made the rest of the garments is not recorded). But in spite of Cao’s prowess, Mao had a weakness for steel and heavy industry, and sewing and tailoring could more easily be turned into women’s labour, through sewing schools and cotton distribution for home sewing, without the need for much public celebration for their contribution.
For change to happen, and for China to get out of its self-imposed zhifu extravaganza (even when the politics that supported this type of garment were starving millions and depriving them of cotton), people had to wait for the Reform Era, after the death of Mao Zedong. And after nearly thirty years, those who had learned how to operate a sewing machine could use them to sew clothes of their own choice, or what they were commissioned by the first private clients they were allowed to have. Dress could again be more gendered, if that was desired, and people no longer had to prove enthusiasm and faithfulness to the regime by wearing a uniform-like zhifu. (Pins, however, after so much upheaval, are now firmly established in the Chinese sewing toolbox.)
How to cite: Sala, Ilaria Maria. “A Rare, Exciting Academic Book: Antonia Finnane’s How to Make a Mao Suit.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 7 Jul. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/07/07/mao-suit.
Ilaria Maria Sala is a writer and a ceramist, based in Hong Kong. She writes in English and Italian, and occasionally in other languages. She is the author of three books (the latest, Pechino 1989, published in 2019 in Italian, is a memoir in words and photos.) Her writing has appeared on The New York Times, Cha, The Guardian, Le Monde,Zolima, and many other publications. People drink and eat from her ceramics in three continents. [All contributions by Ilaria Maria Sala.]
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