Study On The Style And Pattern Of The Minority Nationality Costume In Northwestern China

The minority costume, regarded as “live fossil” of human life, is the carrier of traditionalChinese spiritual culture. It is one of important ways to learn and inherit ethnic minority cultureby researching their ancient costumes. Ethnic minorities in northwest are important integratedparts for China’s minorities. They own different kinds of costumes and these costumes owndifferent shapes and patterns, which are the meanings why we make the study.Ethnic minorities’ costumes in northwest are selected as the research object in this paper. Viathe study of northwest history, geography, culture, through the classification of its fourteenminorities’ethnic origin as well as the analysis of their production ways and lifestyles, uygur andkazak are selected as two typical representatives in northwest area. In further, we make a studyfor their costumes.Real garments and relevant documents are analyzed in the researching process. Via measuringthe real garments, analyzing them, inducing and looking into relevant documents, patterns ofthese costumes are combed systematically as the following two aspects. Firstly, throughanalyzing different kinds of costume shapes and patterns, we learned about the detaileddifferences among each type of them. Secondly, these costumes are compared with the typicalones from northeast, central plains and southern region, and the similarities and differencesamong different regions are found and analyzed.Through the study above, we found the northwest minorities’ clothing generally followed theflat-structure, the typical characteristic of Chinese traditional national costume. However, underthe influence of northwest special geography, its history, own culture, more important, theinfluence of outside culture, their costumes have shown three-dimensional characteristics insome details, which are better for body movement compared with the original Chinese traditionalclothing.These three-dimensional characteristics are innovations for Chinese traditional clothing,further, are also the enrichment of Chinese traditional clothing content.