Fashioning Chinese Women: Empire to Modernity

Author: Michaela Hansen, Jason Wu, Michael Govan, Mei Mei Rado, Sharon Sadako Taked
Format: Hardcover | 144 pages
Dimensions: 21.01 x 1.80 x 27.89 cm
Publication date: 28 April 2026

A visual timeline of modern Chinese fashion, from the end of the Qing dynasty to the Cultural Revolution, told through 70 rare outfits. Published in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

This lavish book presents the high fashion of Chinese women from the late Qing dynasty around 1900 through the 1960s, exploring how women's clothing changed during a period of profound upheaval in Chinese society. Featuring over 120 images, it follows developments in silhouette, tailoring, and textile innovation, showing how Chinese fashion reacted to globalization, modernization, and the evolving place of women. A recurring focus is the qipao, the close-fitting and often richly decorated dress that has become an emblem of modern Chinese femininity. The book traces its appearance in the 1920s and its reinterpretation throughout the diaspora from the 1940s to the 1960s.

Taiwanese Canadian fashion designer Jason Wu, based in New York, created custom 3D-printed mannequins, featuring nine historically inspired hairstyles, to display many of the outfits, recreating the fashionable figures of women across seven decades. Wu also contributes the preface. Two essays by design historians and curators Mei Mei Rado and Michaela Hansen present fresh research and thoughtful analysis of modern Chinese fashion. Rado examines how fashion interacted with China's fast-moving historical and cultural transformations, while Hansen explores how industrial and technological progress changed Chinese textile design. Archival material, including book illustrations, textile prints, magazine covers, and calendar posters, appears throughout. Together, Fashioning Chinese Women provides a detailed visual history of a vibrant period in Chinese fashion that Western art museums and publishers have long overlooked.