page_title: Popular fashion in ancient China
section_title: Clothing
hierarchical_section_title: Popular fashion in ancient China / Clothing
caption_attribution_description: English: Cropped from a Song dynasty painting attributed to Emperor Huizong in the style of Tang dynasty painter Zhang Xuan.
context_page_description: Popular fashion in ancient China was defined by a number of notable aesthetic traditions. The Tang dynasty and Song dynasty are the primary periods in which ancient China refers. There are four remarkable aesthetic categories of these two dynasties, including clothing, famous porcelain, favored flowers, and dominant literary form.
context_section_description: The most eye-catching clothing in Tang dynasty is women's clothing, in which the traditional "Ruqun"(Ru Dress 襦裙) formed a unique fashion in the Tang Dynasty and Tang people have their distinctive aesthetics.  One significant feature of this clothing is that the original collar was transformed into a low collar in the Tang Dynasty. This style of collar, which is so low that nearly makes women's breast half-naked, is unprecedented in all dynasties in ancient China. In addition, the waist skirt was raised extremely high to even the underarms (a picture provided on the right for reference) in order to show a chubby body shape. In addition to the style, the colors are rich such as deep red, apricot yellow, deep purple, moon green, grass green, and turmeric and so on. This is because people in Tang Dynasty admire the plump body figure and are pursuit of personal preference and the resplendent beauty boldly. Moreover, such aesthetics benefits from the extreme open thoughts and cultural environment that greatly reduces the restrictions on women.  Therefore, women possess more freedom to make the clothing choice, by which they can display individuality, for example,through showing off body figure or dressing in favourite colours.             
  On the other hand, the most common clothing for both man and women and represents their aesthetics in Song Dynasty is "Beizi" (背子). The most prominent feature is the straight collars that parallel to each other with side slits. The sleeves can be wide or narrow, and the length of the clothes can reach to the knees or ankles or above knees... The colours are usually pure and less bright, which represents Song people's different aesthetics that like simplicity, calmness and sense comparing to the unrestrained clothing style in Tang Dynasty.
  This aesthetics change is due to the cultural transformation in the Song Dynasty. The spirit of Chinese classical aesthetics developed to extreme, in which the style of simple and elegant is pursued instead of the deliberate unique. This style of the clothing wrapping people's body into a cylinder through its straight outline, which demonstrates a sense of restraint and abstinence tendency. This tendency emerged from the essential Neo-confucianism that emphasizes strict order and absolute superiority-inferiority relationship and subordination between the monarch and subjects, father and son, and husband and wife.
caption: An example of Ruqun painted by Zhang Xuan(713-755) in Tang
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