A Curious History
of Clothing in Communist China

Antonia Finnane

Tuesday - April 8, 2008
Fenn Tower, Room 303 - 6:00pm
Reception starts at 5:30pm
Free and open to the public

Clothing was once prominent in understandings of what constituted the difference between China and the rest of the world. For outsiders it was the single most obvious feature of Chinese society during the Mao years. Professor Finnane's work combines an account of how fashion has been equated with modernity, progress and the West with a history of clothing in twentieth-century China. In this lecture she considers the fate of fashion in Communist China, showing that despite the difficulties of "dressing up" in the era of the Mao suit, there were some surprising points of convergence between fashions in China and the West during the Cold War years.

Antonia Finnane is a Reader in history in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550-1850, which was awarded the 2006 Joseph Levenson Book Award for a work on pre-1900 China, and appeared in Chinese translation in 2007. Her interests span the fields of social history and material culture of China over the last five hundred years. Her books include Far From Where?: Jewish Journeys from Shanghai to Australia (1999) and Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (2007). Her current research concerns consumption in late imperial China, with a particular focus on shops and shopping.

For more information, call 216.523.7191 or email Dr Nicki Tarulevicz: n.tarulevicz@csuohio.edu.