The Chinese Fashion Industry on the Eve of Shanghai’s Socialist Transformation, 1946-1956 

Presenter(s)

Yutong (Max) Zhu

Abstract or Description

This study uses the combined experiences of Shanghai’s fashion stores and fashion consumers during the early years of the Chinese People’s Republic to investigate the city’s treaty-port legacy and its transition into a socialist society. Viewing Western fashion as a legacy of “semi-colonialism” and fashion stores as a high-end and speculative service industry that did not serve the People, from 1949 to 1956 the new regime adopted coercive political campaigns and de-marketization policies that ravaged the private fashion stores. In doing so it enjoyed initial success establishing a new hegemony of proletarian fashion.4 In fact, the imposition of a new fashion regime and de-marketization policies mutually reinforced each other, resulting in a quicker transformation to public-private joint management than the state initially had planned. As I demonstrate, the apparent enthusiastic support from both store owners and the public turned Shanghai’s 1956 completion of joint management into a highly-publicized state bailout of the fashion industry. However, public sentiments did not change overnight, but through processes of gradual renegotiation. Over several years, both store owners and consumers continued to challenge the new hegemony on their own terms. Although the exact moment when popular sentiments shifted is obscured by the available sources, evidence suggests that the Party’s early attempt to remold the humiliating cultural legacy of treaty-port era achieved only mixed results. At least until 1957 ambivalences remained within Shanghai’s grassroots society and these ambivalences found their way into political discourse where they functioned as a new counter-hegemony. This political discourse of ambivalence dwindled in 1957 when the Anti-Rightist Campaign reduced the space for public negotiation over the meaning of socialist fashion.

Mentor

Benno Weiner