Seven years ago on a family trip in China, I stopped by the Shanghai Museum to check out the ethnic minority costumes on their top floor. As a New York-based fashion designer, I had often kept images of traditional costumes of other cultures as a part of my own design inspiration archive. I had already been exposed to the best fabrics and embroideries in the world, having started my design career at Donna Karan Collection. The intricate details and impeccable craftsmanship of the Chinese minority costumes behind those museum glass vitrines really impressed me that day — as the embroideries workmanship competed with the best suppliers in the world and could have adorned the clothes of any of the French haute couture labels
There were…(Elaborate more on costumes based on my museum pics) that I would later learn were on the tentative list of UNESCO heritage in need of urgent safeguarding.
But what surprised me even more was the year they had all been made — some as late as the 1990s! And the region they had come from — most notably, Miao villages in Guizhou province.
While I had assumed that these traditional costumes were created hundreds of years ago, all the pieces had, in fact, only been made in the last 50 years (?). This meant that the artisans who made these were still alive and that I could go directly to them to order fabrics and embroideries! This was so exciting for me because, well, the normal industry practice is to send an image or fabric sample to a fabric mill in Italy and just have them to reproduce it in a similar way — the final result is, of course, never as good as the original. But in this case, I could go directly to the original source and get the real thing made!
So that weekend, I hopped on a flight to Guizhou province and found a translator and driver to accompany me through the region.
When I arrived, the translator told me he had just been guiding the textile collectors of The British Museum, who had been studying the region for some years now. He suggested buying as much fabric as I could on this trip because the costumes would disappear in the next 5-10 years; the young generation was not interested in continuing the craft, apparently.
What I discovered: social issues
This alarmed me because, as a designer, my instinct was to find a way to keep it from dying out. It seemed like such a simple task! But he and all the people I would meet over the next three years told me same thing repeatedly: the grandmothers who can make my fabric are no longer living and, no matter how much I pay them, the young people are not interested in learning the traditional craft. What was even more intriguing is that the locals didn’t even seem to mind. But all I could think of was how am I going to get my beautiful fabric?
The solution seemed so simple: get the older generation to teach the younger generation to weave so the traditional know-how doesn’t die out. But the young generation was hard to find in these villages. Most leave as teenagers to become migrant workers in the coastal factories. With no opportunities to make money in the villages, 70% – 80% of the population leaves the villages, leaving their children, babies to early teens, to be cared for by their grandparents. They make up the 61 million “left-behind children” across China that grow up without their parents and cared for by extended family, oftentimes grandparents. That’s 20% or 1/5 of all children of China. It’s a sacrifice these young parents must make, in China’s speed towards progress in recent decades. Under the hukou, rural villagers can only exercise their welfare rights, including health and education, in their home village. This means that their children must remain in the villages to attend school while the parents send money home to pay for their families. Sadly because of the long distance, the parents can only return once a year, when they are given extended time off during Chinese New Year.
I sensed that the main competition for getting my fabrics was not other designers coming into the region per se, but it was the global shopping habits of Americans back in my home country fueling demand for cheap Made in China products that was driving all the young villagers to the coastal factories. If the minimum wage in China is only 2000 RMB ($270 USD), then, from my Western perspective, it seemed obvious to me that paying the villagers more than that would lure them back to their home — where they would be happier and prefer to live. And my designing modern clothing from their traditional fabrics would bring a revenue stream and much-needed employment into the villages.
But there was a strange insecurity about the revitalization of traditional textiles, and all I heard from the adults was a polite, “I don’t think so.” I later learned that my generation of young adult Chinese were taught that anything before 1949 was considered “bad.” That was the year Mao Zedong established the People’s Republic of China. During the Communist Revolution, a campaign began in 1966 to destroy traditional values and bourgeois things in the Four Olds (Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas). Somehow, the traditional culture of the rural villages survived better than the rest of the country, perhaps due to their geographic isolation in the Karst mountains, which covers 90% of the land, and because many were still inaccessible by road. But the deep insecurity remained amongst the grandmothers that anyone would be interested in the heirloom textiles they have safely stored inside their homes. This also helped me understand why the modern Han Chinese in the cities were not interested in the traditional minority fabrics — seeing them as old and of poor quality, and handmade because the makers could not afford to buy machine-made fabrics. For they generally now prefer new and shiny buildings, as you’ll know if you’ve ever stepped into the blindingly white and spotless luxury malls of Shanghai. Every time I’d leave for the Guizhou villages, my friends in Shanghai would tell me to “be careful,” as if hanging out with elderly grandmothers and little children on a mountain top is dangerous — but that is the general misconception from the urban Chinese, many of whom have never visited a traditional village. After all, from 2000 – 2010, China went from 3.7 million villages to 2.6 million, at a loss of 300 villages per day.
China may seem like one race from the outside, but the nation is actually made up of 56 ethnic groups. Han Chinese make up nearly 92% of the population, while the ethnic minorities (Miao, Dong, Tibetan, etc.) make up 8.49%. They usually come from rural villages, so they are seen as poor, uneducated, and “backwards” by the dominant Han majority. As these ethnic minorities move into the cities, they are subjected to Han chauvinism and lose their culture as they are no longer living concentrated together and begin to assimilate into the dominant Han culture.
For the locals, this Han influence on the younger generation is most evident in the way they dress: a t-shirt, a button-down shirt, and jeans or trousers — which, to me, looks like Western influence. When they return to their home villages once a year, they bring with them this Han influence as a fashionable way of dress. As a fashion designer myself, I take note of how powerful cultures influence dress in this world; in this case, the ethnic minorities prefer to dress like the Han majority, while the Han (the majority of the Chinese population), take their fashion cues from Americans and brands from wealthy Western nations.
How I was introduced to indigenous knowledge
While the Chinese view traditional villages as dangerous and ethnic minorities as “backwards,” these are obviously deep-rooted cultural stereotypes that, from my experience, couldn’t be further away from the truth.
The first thing that struck me about the Miao ethnic minorities was their way of dress. The way they coordinated their outfits with multiple layers of traditional embroidered-jackets with machine-made pieces, the way they twisted and shaped their long hair into chignon topknots, and the confidence in their demeanor of being on their home land— a presence that was certainly lacking in Shanghai where young migrant workers in the restaurants and hotels seemed more hesitant and frightened.
As a fashion designer, I know how much training and visual intelligence it takes to develop the sensitivity to mixing tonal shades and silhouette proportions. And yet here with the villagers looking for very chic and put together in their mix of aprons, pleated skirts, sleeve bands, and folded hats. If they were so “backwards,” as I was led to believe, how were they able to have more style and sophisticated eye than the Han Chinese in Shanghai? After all, in 2010, the urban Chinese were mixing fake Burberry prints with clashing plaids and were so clueless about how to mix-and-match tops and bottoms that magazines and stores had to offer the Chinese woman instructions on how to dress properly.
I later learned that this innate sense of style and harmony of colors could be attributed to “indigenous knowledge,” the wisdom acquired through generations before them. Their daily wardrobe was anchored on the tradition way of dressing, and they were able to dress in dark tonal shades of purples, browns, blues, and black in a way that I was not seeing with the people in the cities like Shanghai and Beijing – where clashing colors and patterns or just bad fashion were more the norm, and fashion magazines were teaching readers how to dress. It’s as if the Cultural Revolution, by cutting Chinese people from their traditional past, also cut them off from any sense of style. For me, the Miao and Dong minorities in Guizhou, and especially the Tibetans I’d later work with in Gansu, were much more chic and cool in the way they dressed than the Han Chinese who were trying so hard to stay on top of wannabe-Western fashion trends in the big cities.
Written in 2017 before designing the first collection
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