Popular Fashion at the end of 20th Century

Historically, Chinese clothing emphasized conformity, not unconventionality, but this changed at the end of the 20th century.

Many traditional Chinese clothes were named after animals, plants and objects. In the past, tiger head hats, rabbit hats, tiger shoes, pig shoes and cat shoes all had characteristics that were reminiscent in some way of the animals they were named for. Ancient Chinese peach scarves and modern radish trousers were named after plants that are similar to them in shape. Boat hats, rocket shoes and hammer shoes were named after objects. Sponge cake shoes resemble Western-style cake in terms of thickness and texture. Then, in the mid-1980s bat-wing sweaters arrived in China.

Bat-wing sweaters were fan-shaped above the hem, with contour lines reaching down the arms to the cuffs. This shape was thought to resemble a bat's wings. Suddenly, old-style woolen sweaters became unpopular.

From 1990 onwards, upper garments became increasingly loose and exaggerated the shoulders, so a short person wearing a broad-shouldered jacket almost became a square. People did not wear overcoats on top of big woolen sweaters - instead they wore small jackets over big sweaters, exposing the sweater below the hem of the jacket. Middle-aged and old people did not like these new styles, saying, "How can you go to work in such disheveled clothes?" Young people found many new styles of clothes fashionable, much to the amusement of the media. Headlines such as "Wearing shorts outside long trousers, strange fashion of the year" and "Wearing short clothes out of long ones, a new street sight" appeared in newspapers. Retailers competed with each other to sell "abnormal" clothes - clothes that represented newer and newer fashions. As a result of the opening up of China, all the old rules regarding clothes were turned upside-down. The long-accepted mode of dress - a loose lower garment paired with a tight upper garment or a short and tight lower garment (tight trousers or short skirt) to match a loose upper garment was no longer taken for granted. People got used to the sight of "abnormal" clothes, and they evolved from strange to fashionable and attractive. After "abnormal" clothes had been accepted, people were finally free of the clothing restrictions that had lasted for a thousand years - and so they wore whatever they wanted to wear, including fashion from all over the world.

After the mid-1980s more and more fashionable clothing styles emerged, with shorter and shorter periods of popularity - new fashions were introduced constantly, and China began to move in step with global fashion trends. Everyday clothes included T-shirts, multi-colored jackets, shirts, straight trousers, peg-top trousers, divided skirts, three-quarter-length trousers, culottes and pleated skirts. Western-style skirts, cheongsams, miniskirts (born in the West in the 1960s) were all the rage. Western-style clothes and ties began to become conventional clothes for formal occasions and were worn by most white collar workers.

In the 1990s, sun dresses and black sandals arrived in China, via Paris. These sun dresses had a tight upper body with two narrow bands on the shoulders and a long loose skirt that reached the ankles. At first, Chinese young women did not dare to wear such revealing dresses and so they wore white T-shirts underneath the dress - it took several years for women to get accustomed to

this style. Next, clothes for women that exposed their bare midriffs appeared, with short sleeves and arms. When these shirts were popular in China, their style was usually less open and bold than the same shirt worn in Japan - in Japan these shirts caused a wave of "belly button beautification." Transparent clothes, such as very thin summer clothes, evolved from the fashion for bare midriffs and became popular across China. These clothes were all part of a movement to cover the parts of the body previously exposed, such as the hands, and expose parts of the body previously covered, such as the waist and the belly button. Heeled sandals evolved into flat shoes worn barefoot, and toenails were painted with colored nail varnish and accessorized with toe rings. Even handbags were completely transparent, and the mechanical movement of some watches could be seen.

At the turn of the century China's fashions were the same as those all over the world, and some clothes became more conservative. In particular, white-collar women paid a lot of attention to looking elegant and understated at work.

By contrast, some young people wished to emulate the anti-establishment fashion statements of Western society and they keenly copied hairstyles and clothes seen in film culture. For example, when the American film The Last of the Mohicans was shown, the Mohican hairstyle was copied -people cut their hair on both sides, leaving only a spiky stand in the middle and dyeing it; people also adopted punk-style clothes, dressed their hair into a horn shape with hair gel, embroidered skull patterns on black leather jackets, and intentionally tore or burned holes in clothes and trousers. So the practice of opening artistic "holes" in clothes became popular between the spring and summer of 1998. Random holes could be made anywhere in clothes, and evenly distributed holes appeared too. This fashion copied "fishnet clothes" from the catwalks of Paris. Now there are were no "norms," - the label "abnormal" no longer had had meaning.