How to Make a Mao Suit
Author(s): Antonia Finnane
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How to Make a Mao Suit
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When the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, new clothing protocols for state employees resulted in far-reaching changes in what people wore. In a pioneering history of dress in the Mao years (1949–1976), Antonia Finnane traces the transformation, using industry archives and personal stories to reveal a clothing regime pivoted on the so-called 'Mao suit'. The time of the Mao suit was the time of sewing schools and sewing machines, pattern books and homemade clothes. It was also a time of close economic planning, when rationing meant a limited range of clothes made, usually by women, from limited amounts of cloth. In an area of scholarship dominated by attention to consumption, Finnane presents a revisionist account focused instead on production. How to Make a Mao Suit provides a richly illustrated account of clothing that links the material culture of the Mao years to broader cultural and technological changes of the twentieth century.
- Presents a history of clothing as a story of production rather than consumption, with a research-driven focus on women's labour
- An interpretation of dress in the Mao era as an internally coherent and defining feature of this period
- Speaks to themes of interest to historians of China, fashion and dressmaking, technology, socialism, and gender
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