The Research Of The Trimming On Women's Wear In The Late Qing Dynasty And Early Republic Period

The goal of this research is to describe and analyze the characteristic of the trimming on women's wear in the late Qing Dynasty and early Republic Period (1860-1950), with an emphasis on the daily informal or semi-formal wear, through some real costumes of that period.This study will use the women's wear of the late Qing Dynasty and early Republic Period collected from Donghua University's Costume Museum of China and Hangzhou Silk Cloth Museum of China. Hands on research can produce a more accurate description of the clothes, can observe more three-dimensional effect intuitionally, as opposed to other methods of research. Nevertheless, periodical "friends", Lunar Calendar and Spring Festival pictures and comments of these pictures are as additional materials.According to the different categories of the costume decoration,trimmings can be divided into five parts: colors matching, material, technique, inner structure and decoration location. All parts are analyzed by universality and particularity of trimming characters of women's wear in the late Qing Dynasty and early Republic Period in different domains. The way in which these parts are combined will also be discussed. Mainly, the study is divided by time; each period is separated into five parts, and a comparison of these subdivisions will also be discussed.At the late Qing Dynasty and early Republic Period, the main difference among all parts of women's trimming can be regarded as the following aspects. From color matching's point of view, in the early Republic Period women favored same-color matching material whereas the late Qing Dynasty they preferred group-color matching. Furthermore, non-color was the most common-used. From the material's point of view, women's wear in late Qing Dynasty trimming was always made of multi-materials. However, the materials in early Republic Period were comparatively simple. Among different trimming materials, silk was the most widely used one. From the technical's point of view, the technique in the late Qing Dynasty was better than that in the early Republic Period with regards to both variety and quality of products. Xiang and Gun were two most widely used trimming technique. In relation to the inner structure, patterns on trimming of women's wear in the late Qing Dynasty were average in content but various in composition of the pattern.However, in the early Republic Period, patterns were composed of discrete and two-dimension structure with plant pictures on them. Furthermore, trimming represents certained linear structure and there were rules that are applied to how to match and scale the line. Finally, we discussed some of the important trimming decoration location, including cuff and lap and their differences in late Qing Dynasty and early Republic Period which all followed the direction from complicated, extravagant and preciseness to brief, austerity and flexibility.Written by Yi Zou (Art & Design)Supervised by Mingxin Bao...