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comradekatara · 10 months

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hey

do u mind sharing with us some of your headcanons about sokka&katara relationship? 🧡🪸

okay these aren’t “headcanons” so much as assorted thoughts on their relationship as siblings, how i view them and what they mean to me. this is hardly news to anyone who knows me, but they are my all time favorite avatar characters and their relationship is so fascinating and meaningful to me. which means that there will be some headcanons sprinkled in just because they do take up so much real estate in my mind that i may as well share some of the (many) thoughts i have on them. but also some analysis, interpretations, hot takes, subjective opinions, etc. and, to be clear, if you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll probably notice that i have gone over a lot of these points before, at some point or another. like i said, they’re my favorite characters, so i think/talk about them a lot lol

– first things first, i do feel a need to add the disclaimer that when approaching their sibling relationship, i do empathize with sokka more just because i am also the eldest sibling and that is genuinely a huge part of my identity, so that’s my perspective when approaching these characters. i also know what it’s like to be the only sister among brothers, but if anything my experiences with that have always made me feel like katara could have it so much worse in the brothers department. which isn’t to say that the only reason i empathize with sokka is because “he could be worse,” obviously he would not be one of my favorite characters of all time if his only redeeming quality was “he could be worse.” but i do think we need to take a second and appreciate that this sixteen year old boy is a statistical anomaly (and not just because he’s a “genius” or whatever). he belongs to the worst demographic ever invented, and yet manages to not only not be an absolute terror, but be a genuinely good person. katara could also be so much worse, by the way. fourteen year old girls are, on average, almost as much of a nightmare as sixteen year old boys! (i would know, i was one.) so yes, while they are both deeply flawed, and as much as they both think the other is so annoying and unreasonable and mean sometimes, they could both have it so much worse. angel siblings fr!!!

also, and i think this is really important to acknowledge, you can separate sokka from katara when discussing her character, but you cannot separate katara from sokka. so when talking about their relationship, as characters, specifically, sokka is more impacted by katara than katara is by sokka, both narratively and emotionally.

– okay. something that i think is so important to realize about both katara and sokka is that they both have these (different) stories that they use as coping mechanisms for the very tragic world they find themselves in, and neither of these narratives is actually fully accurate. they have differing worldviews, but neither one is entirely “right.” sokka’s narrative is extremely joyless. he is the “last man” of the southern water tribe and being a man, in his case, is about preparing himself for the day that he will inevitably die for katara like their mother did. that is his life’s goal; his primary purpose is to be a sacrifice, because that’s what Real Men do. so he spends every day training for the opportunity to eventually die in war, and even when sees more of the world, he still assumes his job is just be like, a bodyguard with no interiority of his own. what challenges that assumption is twofold: a) he has so much interiority; he soaks up new information like a sponge and synthesizes it into his worldview immediately, and suddenly it is a lot harder to be a human shield who thinks of nothing but tragedy and your own inevitable premature death, because you are also thinking about science and culture and art and sex all these things that make the world a richer, more beautiful place to live, and that inform you, as a human being, and you are suddenly a person and dying is no longer your sole priority??? but also b) he meets people who want to protect him. which is crazy to him specifically because he always thought that he is just fodder and therefore not deserving of being protected in his own right. and accepting that people will take risks to keep him safe and make him happy is basically antithetical to his very grim belief of who he is and what he is For.

and then katara’s worldview hinges upon her being the last waterbender of the southern tribe, the survivor of kya’s sacrifice, and a nascent hero. so she has a much more romantic view of the world, where survival is integral to her story (obviously she is also taking for granted that sokka is prepared to die for her at any given moment, but mostly because she rejects the premise that sokka is allowed to die dammit!!!) and she is right all the time because she is a hero full of righteous fury and driven by self-determination and belief in her own ability to create a kinder, juster world, which means she cannot be wrong. the thing about katara is that her philosophy is very good and awesome, but also extremely unrefined and naive, to the point where anything she doesn’t like is an Injustice (sort of like how in our culture the term “problematic” spans “doesn’t have a fully coherent position on whether or not being intersex inherently qualifies someone as being part of the LGBT community” to “being a convicted rapist”, but in her case it’s like “being a fire nation soldier makes you deserving of being frozen in place by my waterbending, but so is being kind of rude to aang”).

and it’s really important to understand that both katara and sokka have flawed narratives about the world and their place in it that they have internalized, and a lot of their points that are opposite (katara thinking that she is at the center of the universe whereas sokka seeing himself as an object rather than a subject, as the main example) are eventually synthesized into a healthy middle, where katara realizes that she is just one person (despite the massive person that has been placed on her due to genocide) and so is everyone else (even the Bad ones), and sokka also realizes that he is a person deserving of humanity, just like everyone else. not that i really foresee either of them fully shedding their defining narratives, bc they have both internalized them so deeply due to their formative traumas, but “the boiling rock” and “the southern raiders” are huge for them respectively in their journeys towards seeing themselves as people instead of symbols. and that is just really important to understand about them, because i think a lot of people think “this sibling’s worldview is right, and this sibling’s worldview is wrong,” but that’s not true! they’re both right to an extent, but also both deeply flawed. and challenging and expanding those worldviews is the basis for their arcs over the course of the show.

– i think my main katara&sokka “headcanon” (ie, interpretation of the text) that rly informs how i view their entire relationship is one that sort of reframes what sokka says about “seeing katara’s face” in “the runaway” with the context of “the southern raiders” to inform it. because i think a lot of people interpret that to mean that he sees/treats katara like she is his mom, but nothing about their relationship and the way they behave around each other indicates that this is the case. like i think it can be easy to take what sokka says there at face value at first, but if you apply what we know about katara as revealed in “the southern raiders” to what sokka says here, it makes a lot more sense as a whole… like you have to remember the context in which sokka is saying this. he is explaining to toph why telling katara not to “act like a mom” is hurtful to her. toph associates motherhood with femininity, submissiveness, conformity – all things that she rejects due to being forced into that mold her whole life (and obviously katara is the furthest thing from being submissive, she is literally a revolutionary, but in this moment, toph thinks that katara criticizing their scams is indicative of that, when really katara is just lashing out because she wasn’t included in the first place). but katara associates motherhood with sacrifice. katara has to carry the guilt of knowing that her waterbending is what got her mother killed, and she has to prove to herself and her mother and her tribe that kya’s sacrifice meant something by becoming the strongest waterbender in the world.

so sokka is first and foremost trying to bridge that gap, that miscommunication between toph and katara wherein they are leveling their deepest formative traumas at each other all over a fundamentally petty fight: katara wants to be included so she lashes out, the fact that she is telling toph what to do makes toph lash out, and it spirals from there. sokka is trying to tell toph that katara has a complicated relationship to motherhood, that her image of “mother” is not the same image toph holds in her mind. if he were saying that katara is a mom and that he sees her as his mom, their relationship would reflect that! but he literally treats her as a little sister. the entire show. the cactus juice incident is like the one instance of sokka needing katara to guide him, and it’s because he’s tripping balls. sokka relies on her, and yes, he relies on her care and compassion and help in many ways, but, and this is crucial, he also relies on her because she is his identity. i don’t think that’s something sokka can even truly recognize in himself, but it’s clear that on a subconscious level katara is his raison d’être, that taking care of his sister (as hakoda tells him, as kanna tells him) is his primary goal at all times. and that’s why he sees katara’s face. because his relationship to his mother is now defined by her sacrifice, the sacrifice he has inherited in her death. katara is everything to him; not because he sees her as his protector, but because he sees himself as her’s.

– ok this one may be kind of controversial……… but to be honest I don’t even really think that sokka and katara had an unfair division of domestic labor due to gender roles. which isn’t to say that those gender roles don’t exist (both in the show, as they are clearly demonstrated, or in real life, since i experienced them in my own family dynamic) or that or that sokka didn’t internalize them, obviously he did (katara also internalized gender roles, she just expresses those beliefs in less overt ways). but based on the little we know about kanna (who is the one making katara do laundry, not sokka, fwiw), i think it’s just far more likely that she kept making katara do domestic chores with her because she needed to keep her inside the house where she could see her. she’s a single grandma, she’s tired as fuck, and she knows that if given any sort of unstructured free time, her hyperactive granddaughter will use her waterbending to accidentally destroy what’s left of their village. which is more or less what happened eventually. and yeah it does suck that katara had to spend her valuable tween years washing her family’s disgusting sweaty socks instead of causing a ruckus, dating a new cute commie boy every week, and fostering intense rivalries with other girljocks, but it’s not like sokka was having a remotely better time so it’s hardly fair to blame him for that! imo her real “enemy” (ie, person looking out for her who made her do laundry) was gran gran but sokka was aligned w/ gran gran so in her mind he was also making her do laundry (the injustice!!!) …plus she did get to do all of those things eventually :)

sidenote: can we talk about how gran gran was so twisted for making katara wash sokka’s socks. like we established she’s making katara do that “for her own good” or w/e, but literally no teenage boy in the history of the world had wanted his little sister to wash his dirty socks for him. frankly, i bet sokka already washed his socks and then gran gran just made katara wash them again because she needed a way to keep her busy. katara’d be like “why do I have to stay indoors all day doing laundry why can’t SOKKA do his OWN laundry” and gran gran, who was just looking for the easiest way to keep an eye on her reckless, hyperactive granddaughter, would be like “okay then if you don’t want to do laundry you could always do your math homework instead...” “okay FINE i’ll do laundry”

– i say this from experience (my brother is younger but also like a foot taller and freakishly strong), sokka’s extraordinarily high pain tolerance (often played to comedic effect) stems from katara beating the shit out of him every single day of their childhood, and him just. not being allowed to retaliate. (we see this throughout the show; she’ll often smack him while he just stands there and barely reacts.) as the older sibling u are simply not allowed to hit back. they can punch u, scratch u (i still have scars), push u over, and u just have to take it. even if they’re only like a year younger! and sokka doesn’t even consider this unfair, because that’s just how it is when you’re an older sibling. (zuko should take notes!) but he also knows how to get under her skin the exact right amount. just shitty enough that it’ll piss her off, but not enough to actually hurt her feelings (saying shit like “leave it to a girl to screw things up” or calling every guy she likes her boyfriend). he never actually crosses the line, but he does know exactly how to annoy her. katara, on the other hand, crosses the line to the point that she doesn’t seem to realize that there is a line?? (“the stars sure are beautiful tonight. too bad you can’t see them toph”) bc katara approaches everything from a righteous rage where she genuinely believes that she is justified in everything she does and says. classic baby of the family behavior, especially compounded by the fact that she was gassed up her whole life for being the special chosen one who brought hope back to their tribe. (she and aang have that to bond over, being Unique and Special and basking in that attention, but also the inherent grief of knowing that what makes them special is also what makes them alone, and knowing that if their people hadn’t been wiped out, they wouldn’t get to be the Hero, but they wouldn’t have to be, either.)

– you probably wouldn’t know it from following me now, but as a kid i did not really care for sokka. like, don’t get me wrong, i liked him fine, but if you asked me to list my top 5 atla characters, he would not be on there. but now he and katara are tied for #1 in equal measure. and a large part of my own journey from liking sokka fine but not particularly caring about him as a child to him becoming my favorite character alongside katara as an adult was my progression from “oh he’s just katara’s brother” to “no he is actually so much more than that he’s brilliant and an invaluable member of their group” to “actually he is just katara’s brother.” but his role as katara’s brother is what makes him so awesome. like katara was always my favorite character and i think it’s very obvious as to why a young girl would latch onto this very heroic and empowering fantasy. and the older i got the more i appreciated her depth, her flaws, the ways in which she is messy and imperfect and human. and i came to appreciate sokka as an extension of katara, as a character who is entirely devoted to her, who sublimates himself to protect her. their bond is so special and beautiful to me because it is so fraught and tenuous and filled with grief, but also so authentic and adorable and genuine.

i also think that getting older just necessitates appreciating sokka more. you go from being the baby who wants adventure to being the babysitter who is so fucking exhausted. i simply was not tired enough as a kid to See sokka and empathize with him. katara was far flashier and more exciting and easier to root for and enjoy. and i still do root for and enjoy her, and not just because she was formative for me, but because i will never stop finding nuances in her character that fascinate me, but i think sokka, as this depressed kid who feels fundamentally worthless and is far more morally grey than katara, is a character who is kind of an afterthought the first time you watch the show, especially as a child, even if you like his jokes or whatever (frankly i’ve always felt like toph is the funniest atla character overall). i think i’m in the unique position of having given this show so much real estate in my mind that i do genuinely believe that sokka is the most interesting and nuanced character in atla, but most people, even fans of sokka’s character, are just like, what the hell are you talking about. but he is! katara is the prototypical hero and narrator of this fantasy adventure quest narrative, and sokka is extremely not. which is why they play off each other so well, and why picking an Ultimate Favorite between them is actually impossible.

– obviously i’ve stated before that i think katara should be chief, and i will defend that belief to the death, but i also think people interpret that as me saying that she is given a massive responsibility that she is forced to bear alone, and that’s like. definitely not. no. first of all i don’t see katara becoming chief for at least a few decades (just because aang has to be the avatar at 12 and zuko has to be the firelord at 16 doesn’t mean that there’s a power vacuum in the southern water tribe in immediate need of filling). once she becomes chief she already has a huge support network in place, including her friends and family, but also spanning beyond them, across her entire community. katara loves bonding with people and making new friends, and i definitely think she has people to help her as chief, it’s not a role she would have to take on alone. and of course, sokka would be there. i think sokka would sub in and be chief when katara needed a break (so if anyone’s like “well in lok they say that sokka was chief” this is my explanation for that lol) and they would basically lead the southern water tribe together. but also sokka would not want to stay in one place all the time, whereas i think by the time katara is like in her 30s she pretty much lives there permanently, because all her students and patients and family and friends are there (zuko visits frequently). she’d still travel with aang and go on little adventures, but her whole life she has wanted to liberate her people and rebuild her culture and contribute to her community in a significant way, and so i can’t really see her living anywhere or doing anything else.

– finally: i like to think that after kya’s death, sokka was the one to braid katara’s hair every day, and it was this little ritual for them. (in the unaired pilot, katara teases sokka for braiding her doll’s hair when he was six, and i totally think that’s canon even if it didn’t make it into the show.) but then at some point or another, after all the men left the tribe, katara decided that she could braid her own hair and she stopped asking sokka to do it for her. and then a little while after that katara was in a bad mood because she was reminded of her mom or her dad or any of the other problems in her life, so she started yelling at sokka that he doesn’t even braid her hair anymore because he’s too busy trying to be their father to be her brother, and sokka just stood there and hoped that once she took her frustrations out on him she’d feel better. and then years later katara saw sokka braiding toph’s hair and she freaked out both because she’s offended that toph would ask sokka over her but also that sokka would braid toph’s hair but not her’s. and sokka’s just like “well… she asked me to…” and katara doesn’t want to ask sokka to braid her hair since she has been doing it by herself for years now, but she also does miss having her hair braided. one day sokka walks in on zuko braiding katara’s hair for her and he’s just like “ok well now this is unacceptable” but katara’s just like “you started it when you braided toph’s hair” and so sokka has to let zuko braid his sister’s hair as if sokka’s entire life does not revolve around being katara’s big brother. yeah it’s fine. he’s fine with it.

– as for all my other katara & sokka posts, featuring a whole assortment of analyses and headcanons, you can peruse this very full tag!

#sending this ask you may as well have unwittingly summoned a demon #only.... 3.6k words and 9 pages (on google docs) later......#and i still have so much more to say tbh #goats !!!#khrystyav #asks #katara #sokka #katara&sokka #kanna&katara #don't know how to tag this #analysis #but only partially #most of it is just random thoughts #about the most insane codependent siblings of all time

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audreydoeskaren · 2 years

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hiii there!!! i've been focused on eastern fashion for some time now and so far i haven't come across good sources for studying anything from china, let alone east asia. so this probably has been asked before but what advice do you have for new people trying to study chinese fashion?

I do have a couple personal tips! This spiralled off into a very long post which also addresses some historiographical issues, read til the end if interested.

Primary sources

Good books and articles about Chinese fashion history are few and far in between, and may not cover every time period, so primary sources are your best friends. Try to find as many artworks and texts related to fashion as possible for the time period you’re interested in, and don’t feel limited to “famous” artworks or conventional genres. “Famous” historical Chinese paintings rarely depicted realistic fashion, if they depicted people at all. Fashion should be sought in formal portraits, book illustrations, photographs, export art, figurines and burial artifacts etc.. The availability of each genre depends on the time period, the further back in time you go the more scant sources become, which is why I would recommend newcomers begin with a more recent time period, like the 19th and 20th centuries. For fashion history purposes, all visual resources are valuable as long as they depict realistic fashion, and artworks from historically less prestigious genres can be very helpful for cross referencing.

Ideally, one should have a variety of sources across genres. For example, Republican era fashion is usually studied through calendar paintings (月份牌), but these only depicted upper class women in a very specific commercialized, socially conservative context. Therefore, it would be helpful to also look at professional fashion illustrations, photographs of film stars and costumes in films for avant garde designs, as well as photographs of common women for more everyday attire. For the 19th and 20th centuries, it’s good to have artworks as well as photographs/videos, to understand both the fashion ideal and how it transferred onto real bodies.

Avant garde evening fashion on actress Hu Die, early 1930s.

Most of these things could be found online, through both reliable and dodgy methods. Since I don’t live in China, I can’t visit any museums that physically hold the artifacts, so I just pray that they have things digitized. Fashion historians and enthusiasts on Weibo and Xiaohongshu also post sources they have pretty often, so do check out those platforms. I’m afraid I can’t regularly see what people there have to say because Chinese social media platforms stress me out and give me anxiety as a Chinese person.

It is also important to be able to parcel out what primary sources are reliable for fashion history purposes, whether they depict real life fashion or something fantastical. This is most relevant for Chinese fashion prior to the 19th century, as the abundance of artworks in the 仕女 shinv genre often led people to mistake the imaginary costumes they depicted for real life fashion, because they adhered to stereotypes of “ancient” Chinese clothing cultivated in the 20th century. Shinv as a genre that specifically portrayed women gradually stopped depicting actual women’s fashion in the Late Middle Ages, and developed an “industry standard” style of fantastical costuming based on a fossilized version of Tang and Song styles (not actual Tang and Song fashion). I don’t know why this is but I know it is. Shinv artworks should NEVER be used as fashion history resources, those created after the Song Dynasty should be viewed with suspicion. Faulty understandings of pre-Qing fashion in older literature mostly stem from the inability to distinguish shinv artworks from realistic ones. With some experience of looking at these paintings, it becomes very easy to tell them apart from formal portraits and illustrations that depict real fashion. Here are some established features of shinv costuming:

The top is always tucked inside the skirt, which is contrary to real life fashion in the Yuan, Ming, Qing and 20th century.

The hairstyles are very tall and complicated, often gravity-defying

There are long, dangling decorative tassels and braids hanging from the waistband, as well as other accessories that contribute to flowiness, such as 披帛 pibo shawls

Shinv piece by Xu Beihong (1895-1953). The style of costuming is consistent with shinv artworks from previous centuries; obviously real life women did not dress like this in the early 20th century.

Use recent literature

This is a general academia thing not just fashion history, but for some reason people tend to make an exception when it comes to Chinese fashion history. DO NOT RELY ON BOOKS THAT ARE TOO OLD, especially if they’re written before the 2000s. There were a series of books on Chinese historical fashion from the 70s and 80s that were highly influential foundational works for the subject, but with the body of research that has surfaced after their publication, a significant chunk of the information in them became outdated and is now considered incorrect. New books and articles are constantly being written about Chinese fashion history, so please consult those instead of the same incorrect books from the last century. I cringe even looking at some of my older posts which were written like, a year ago, how can you expect something from decades ago to be any good.

Class difference

Most English language literature on historical Chinese fashion until very recently only ever focus on court dress, but it should be noted that most if not all historical Chinese courts had highly codified systems of dress that dictated what a person of a certain rank and standing could wear in what situation, at what time of day or year. Many types of court dress could not really be considered “fashion”, since they were ceremonial and meant to remain identical throughout the duration of a dynasty, serving purposes more symbolic and political than fashionable. Civilian fashion was much more lively and consistent in terms of rate of change. From my personal experience, both Ming and Qing are hit pretty hard by this misunderstanding, since a lot of civilian women’s fashion during the Ming is overlooked and neglected in favor of court dress with a lot of bling, and 18th century civilian Han women’s fashion is so underrepresented it’s practically invisible. Fashion had a large presence in the metropolis outside of court, especially as we draw closer to the 20th century.

18th century jifu, a kind of court dress. Apart from the overrepresentation of court dress, Qing Dynasty garments are ALWAYS displayed in this manner (laid flat instead of draped on a mannequin, because that would be too humanizing) in photographs from books and articles for maximum orientalism (no concrete evidence, just how I see it). Not that there’s anything wrong with displaying garments like this, it’s probably the best way to store them, but the severe lack of visual representations of how 2D clothes look on 3D people is frustrating.

18th century civilian fashion in a painting.

Continuity and difference

Oftentimes Chinese historical fashion is treated as sporadic episodes, people dressing themselves in one style and then suddenly changing to another one overnight when a new dynasty/decade is established. This mindset probably won’t take you very far in fashion history, because historical Chinese fashion was more like a continuous stream of development where small changes happened one after another, adding up to a major change every now and then. Seeing history as clean cut episodes marginalizes transitional periods where either important changes happened or things were simply very interesting and worthwhile to study.

When put into a postcolonial context, however, the use of clean cut time periods suddenly appears somewhat helpful. Like I explained, there are problems with the episodic view of history, but you have to admit it’s useful for representation. When people think of Western historical fashion, most can name certain periods or styles like 18th century robes a la francaise, high waisted Regency gowns, Victorian crinolines and bustles etc., which one probably learns from period dramas and the like. Whether the impressions are accurate is beside the point, as firstly there is an awareness that there were distinct periods and styles. The same cannot be said for the general perception of historical Chinese fashion, or any other non white society’s historical fashion, even though it is entirely plausible and even easy to divide Chinese historical fashion into similar distinct periods with their unique characteristics. People just think of historical Chinese fashion as “Chinese”, as if that alone is an accurate or sufficient description. As of currently, the only periods and styles represented in this way are, I think, Tang Dynasty chest-high ruqun, Qing Dynasty Manchu court dress and maybe Republican era cheongsam, which are common subjects of representation (with miserable accuracy) in period dramas. I personally would suggest people first getting into Chinese fashion history to come up with some of these time period distinctions but not take them too seriously, as they’re good for understanding the general gist of a time period and invite further research.

Narratives

Now I would like to delve into more abstract and ideological territory.

Maybe the smart people reading this can tell me if this is postmodern or something, but I think it’s important to keep in mind that lived experiences of fashion in history often run contrary to grand narratives about fashion and society that attempt to sanction what they should look like and police the acceptable ways in which they are interpreted. There are especially many grand narratives and discourses around 19th and 20th century Chinese fashion, such as the classic colonial line about late Qing fashion being backwards and stagnant and needing Western intervention I berate every so often, the pseudo feminist line about Republican era women’s fashion being inherently liberating (I’m going to talk about this in more depth in another post I’m working on), and the Cold War era anti-communist misconception about Mao era PRC not having fashion etc.. Not to mention how many of these narratives were built upon ignorance of actual historical fashion, as fashion history did not become an established discipline until the 1970s and writers speculating before that usually misinterpreted facts or straight up fabricated them (I have a couple examples of this I’m thinking of posting later). These always make me so uncomfortable I feel like I couldn’t breathe, like they’re trying to force me to feel a particular way and put my brain into a very small and tight box.

This is because the 19th and 20th centuries were centuries of grand narratives, shaped by various phenomena and ideologies of the modern era like colonialism, nationalism, fascism and communism. These are essentialist narratives constructed by historians that often serve present and future socio-political purposes, and should be handled with suspicion. These narratives are so influential that they often lead people to carry out intricate mental gymnastics to deny reality; no number of genuine photographs, films and artworks can convince someone sold on grand narratives that many people did indeed wear nice clothes in Mao’s China, seriously I’ve tried and failed so many times. If a narrative is constantly proven wrong by pieces of evidence, maybe it’s time to ditch it.

Costumes in 1950s mainland film.

Grand narratives existed before the 19th century too, I’m just not very well versed with them and can’t comment much, though I assume the general gist is the same. A well known example off the top of my head is the dynastic cycle theory in imperial era historiography, which describes Chinese history as cycles that repeat themselves with each dynasty. This view is allowed to fester in fashion history as well, with historians often describing fashion at the beginning of a dynasty as “simple” and “conservative”, which gradually develops into more extravagant and spectacular forms as the dynasty’s political power declines. An obvious problem with this view is its equating luxury and consumption with moral degeneracy and decline, which was historically used by Chinese ruling classes as a tool to enforce Confucian ideology. The other problem is that it completely fails to explain fashion at a more detailed level when it comes to actual, tangible features like fabrics, decorative motifs, silhouettes etc., and disregards linear, continuous changes that took place across dynasties. For example, late Ming women’s fashion showed more continuity with the early Qing than earlier parts of the same dynasty, and it’s more helpful to see the Ming and Qing as a continuum in terms of textile production technology and aesthetic tastes rather than two distinct cycles. (Come to think of it, I’m not sure whether dynastic cycle theory was actually used by Chinese historians before Western colonialism, or it was assumed that it was used by historians of the 20th century. That makes quite a difference.)

This is just one example, these grand narratives are everywhere and way too rampant in Chinese history discourse (not just fashion) to simply avoid or ignore. It would be more effective to have some knowledge in historiography (the study of the study of history) and theory so you can actively unravel and deconstruct them to ensure a smooth and pleasant journey on the highway of fashion history. Out of the books I’ve read so far, the ones that helped me the most are probably Edward Said’s Orientalism (I would be nowhere without him!), Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. These are very basic and accessible books so they’re useful outside fashion history as well.

To save you the trouble of feeling unnecessary ways like gasping in disbelief at the sight of beautiful dresses from the 1950s mainland, I suggest not to take grand narratives seriously, as they cause too many practical problems when you want to look at things a little deeper beyond surface level. I’m not asking for objectivity as it’s probably impossible, I’m not objective at all, I’m asking for an awareness of narratives and power dynamics. It’s better to first familiarize yourself with the factual part of fashion history i.e. what silhouettes and hairstyles were popular in what year/decade, before constructing narratives, or not construct narratives at all.

High expectations

Because of the prevalence of Eurocentrism and the massive volume of literature and media already produced about historical Western fashion, as well as the relatively recent academic interest in the historical fashion of non white societies, it can give people just starting out in Chinese fashion history the wrong idea that it’s going to be a breeze compared to the highly professional and demanding field that is Western fashion history. Please don’t get into Chinese fashion history expecting it to be easy. I’ve made this mistake in the past and paid a hefty price for it (significant loss of brain cells and hair trying to figure out stuff in an extremely niche subject and time period). Most people are probably aware that China had a fashion history, but most also aren’t aware of how complex and rich it actually is. You can really afford to be as specific and pedantic as you like, narrowing down changes in styles to those within a decade or between every 2 or 3 years as is customary for the 20th century. I’m not gatekeeping or trying to scare people off, if anything it’s good that Chinese fashion history is so complex because there’s always something new to learn. It’s just that I constantly get this vibe from some people in my askbox that they think Chinese society is so primitive and simple that I can answer some of their super generalized questions in one sentence or something. That’s really counterproductive.

TL;DR use primary sources, read recent literature, be wary of grand narratives, keep an open mind, apply the same theories and criticisms from other academic disciplines, and you should do just fine. And have fun exploring Chinese historical fashion!!

#don't know how to tag this #fashion history #chinese fashion

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