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In this article:
- The cheongsam, or qi pao, as it’s sometimes called, is just one of many traditional Chinese outfits.
- Unlike other traditional dresses, which are tied to the world of imperial dynasties, the cheongsam is associated with the glitz and glamour of 1920s Shanghai.
- The dress’ iconic silhouette and timeless elegance have been immortalized in classic Chinese films like In the Mood for Love (2008), Street Angels (1937), and The Goddess (1934).
- Though other traditional outfits, namely the hanfu, have experienced a resurgence in popularity, the cheongsam hasn’t received the same amount of attention.
- But tailors in Shanghai are working double-time to make the dress of the modern Chinese woman new again.
The cheongsam is a rarity among traditional dresses.
Traditional outfits are typically too impractical for daily wear or run directly against what we commonly consider to be good fashion sense in today’s world to be worn on a regular basis.
Not the cheongsam, though. This tight-fitting dress, known for its beautiful embroidery and magical ability to give any woman an S figure, still looks as stylish today as it did when it was first worn on the streets of 1920s Shanghai by the city’s fashionable elite.
Cheongsam History 101
When America had flapper dresses, China had the cheongsam.
The beginnings of what would later become the cheongsam first emerged in the 1910s, a time when China was transitioning from being an empire to a republic. Before the Chinese Revolution, China was ruled by the Manchu-led Qing Dynasty, one of the few non-Han dynasties, which remained in power from 1644 to 1912.
This meant that for centuries, the loose robes worn by women of the Manchu ethnic group were the clothes associated with urban life and status, because who else would be dominant in urban centers?
Unlike the cheongsam, Manchu robes were loose-fitting and consisted of two pieces which consisted of a top and a skirt or pants. But even then, the robes already had the basic design elements that the cheongsam later grew to have.
Note the Mandarin collars and pankou, Chinese knotted buttons that keep the clothes tied to the body while also serving as a form of decoration. Pankou could be a simple knot or an intricate design made to resemble phoenixes, dragons, and lotus blossoms.
Another thing to note is the pair of slits along the sides of the dress which help the wearer move. This is especially important later when the Manchurian robe finally becomes the narrow, tight cheongsam that would be nearly impossible to walk in if not for its slits.
Like the power suit-clad women of 80s America, the new generation of female students began to dress like men in a bid to be taken seriously.
So how does the cheongsam go from this to a style icon? For that, we have young female students to thank.
The girls, who were not accepted in formal schooling before, suddenly found themselves able to go enter educational institutions that were once the exclusive realm of men due to a push within the republic’s government for women’s equality.
May Fourth Feminism, a movement largely spearheaded by men, argued that women needed to be educated and liberated to create a stronger China that was free of the Qing dynasty’s weaknesses.
Like the power suit-clad women of 80s America, the new generation of female students began to dress like men in a bid to be taken seriously. They started wearing plain cotton robes that resembled changpao, a type of men’s attire.
Their fashion-forward outfits embodied a new Chinese woman who was educated, modern, and liberated compared to her predecessors.
And to top it all off, she was stylish.
The students’ proto-cheongsam spread throughout the city of Shanghai, a port city that had a strong French cultural presence due to the French Concession that existed inside the city at the time.
Couple Western influence with the young Chinese republic’s rejection of tradition and you start to see where these women got the idea to make the early cheongsam tighter, shorter, and more risqué.
The tight cheongsam that became popular in Shanghai later became the internationally known version of the dress.
However, just like the fine line between today’s subculture fashions, the cheongsam had a less popular Beijing-style cousin that was nicknamed jingpai. This version of the cheongsam had a more traditional appearance that featured a looser cut than that of the haipai, the Shanghai-style cheongsam.
The city was one of the global strongholds of Jazz music where it was mixed with traditional folk and opera, much like how the cheongsam melded the traditional past and Western present.
In a way, these two cheongsams also embodied a disconnect within post-Qing China. The haipai symbolized a Western way of thinking while the jingpai clung to tradition. This isn’t an exaggeration — their names, 海派 and 京派, translate to “Shanghai faction” and “Beijing faction.”
But again, the cheongsam was the dress of the new Chinese woman and so, the Shanghai haipai prevailed.
And the haipai couldn’t have gained its style supremacy at a better time.
1920s Shanghai was an era of glitz and glamour, no less luxurious than the Roaring 20s of the West. The city was one of the global strongholds of Jazz music where it was mixed with traditional folk and opera, much like how the cheongsam melded the traditional past and Western present.
Shanghai jazz and the Shanghai cheongsam thrived together in the city’s dance halls where businessmen, politicians, ambassadors, thinkers, and artists alike gathered. Among them were the directors of China’s silent films.
The Dress Was Featured in Some of the Most Iconic Chinese Films of the Past Century
The modern Shanghai cheongsam makes one of its earliest appearances in Chinese film with The Goddess (1934). Directed by Wu Yonggang, the film stars Ruan Lingyu, an actress who’s been hailed as “China’s Ingrid Bergman,” as a single mother who resorts to prostitution to provide for her young son.
Ruan Lingyu’s character is shown exclusively in cheongsams that emphasize her femininity and involvement in sex work.
Cheongsams were a symbol of xin nuxing, the new woman, but like the flapper dress, they were deemed scandalous and had connotations of promiscuity. Though Ruan Lingyu isn’t the only female actress who wears a cheongsam in the film, she’s the only one who wears it in the modern style, without a skirt or pants.
Wu Yonggang’s story is uncharacteristically sympathetic to sex workers for its time and the film itself is still easy to watch for modern viewers. Here’s a link to the film in case you’d like to give it a shot.
The cheongsam shows up again in Street Angels (1937), a film about a songstress who works at a teahouse as a sort of indentured servant. The songstress, who’s played by Zhou Xuan, is shown wearing a checkered cheongsam as she sings “Song of the Seasons” to a group of men.
Though not a sex worker herself, Zhou Xuan’s songstress and her cheongsam are connected to disreputable professions.
One of the few times she’s depicted as a free person is when she choses to sing “The Wandering Songstress” for a young man living across the street, this time wearing a diamond patterned cheongsam.
But perhaps the most memorable appearance of a cheongsam in cinema is in Wang Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2005) where Maggie Leung’s character, Mrs. Chan, wears 30 different cheongsams. That’s only counting the ones that made it into the final cut.
William Chang, the film’s costume designer, made almost 50 cheongsams for the movie.
In the Mood for Love‘s cheongsams take on a life of their own in the film. Few things, aside from Maggie Cheung herself, stand out in each frame as well as the cheongsams do. They give us an insight into how Mrs. Chan feels throughout the film.
Incidentally, it’s clothes that start the entire drama of the movie: Both Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow discover that their spouses are cheating on them with each other after Chan’s husband wears a necktie from the same store where Chow’s tie is from and Chow’s wife has a handbag that’s suspiciously just like Chan’s.
Aside from being in slow-burn romances and stories about sex workers, the cheongsam appears in Lust, Caution (2007), a World War II film where an assassin falls in love with the person she’s supposed to kill.
The movie also pays a homage to Zhong Xuan in Street Angels in a scene where the lead actress, wearing a blue cheongsam, alludes to prostitution before performing “The Wandering Songstress” with movements typical of Kunqu opera.
A more recent memorable appearance is in Flowers of War (2011), a historical drama featuring a group of cheongsam-wearing sex workers who make the ultimate noble sacrifice for a group of schoolgirls who revile them for being “whores.”
The cheongsam in film is so often worn by tragic female characters. In real life, the cheongsam is in danger of meeting a similar end.
Unlike the Hanfu, the Cheongsam Is Dying and Few Are Stepping up to Save It
The cheongsam may have been a child of the Chinese revolution, but a second one heralded its doom. The Cultural Revolution brought a wave of anti-bourgeois sentiment and the cheongsam, a gleaming symbol of Shanghai extravagance, was one of its main targets.
A Chinese First Lady, Wang Guangmei, was paraded around in a necklace made of ping pong balls, meant to satirize Qing dynasty jewelry, for wearing a cheongsam to a function in Indonesia.
This hostility to the cheongsam forced tailors to flee to Hong Kong which was still under British rule. There, the dress continued to flourish, but back home, it had lost its popularity virtually overnight. By the late 1960s, it began to fall out of fashion in Hongkong, Taiwan, and Singapore.
Today, the still-living proponents of the Cultural Revolution are being disappointed by the young Millennial and Gen Z enthusiasts of the Hanfu Revival Movement who are revitalizing interest in Hanfu clothes, the traditional attire of the Han people. However, other than the tiny qi lolita group, no subculture has taken to wearing the cheongsam with as much enthusiasm.
According to Fung Yau-choi, a 74-year-old tailor who began making cheongsams when he was 12, this is a far cry from the golden age of the cheongsam.
Some updated iterations of traditional dresses fall too far from the tree to be recognizable.
“It was a prosperous business,” He told South China Morning Post. “[Cheongsam making] is doomed to become a lost art, and there’s nothing to do about it. I am certainly not the best tailor in this profession.
Mr. Kan, a third-generation cheongsam tailor, had the same lament, “Everyone wore them then. Women wore cheongsams to work, to the wet market and in the kitchen. But now in the street, we hardly see women wear cheongsam, almost everyone wears jeans, T-shirt and dresses instead.”
The two tailors are part of the remaining handful of traditional cheongsam tailors in Hong Kong and while they both fear that the cheongsam will go extinct, younger designers have taken on the task of modernizing the cheongsam to bring it back into style.
Like many “reimaginations” of traditional attire, however, some modern designers skip the pankou and other traditional elements, keeping only the dress’ timelessly chic silhouette.
Designer Gino Gonzales has observed that some updated iterations of traditional dresses fall too far from the tree to be recognizable, stating in an interview with Inquirer that, “They think they’re being innovative but by not knowing the history, the tendency of some designers is to create corrupted versions.”
