Modern hanfu male casual fashion

I dunno if you’ve already talked about this, but what are your thoughts on the hanfu vs hanbok discourse? I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on it. No worries, I love tackling controversial topics. But if you don’t want to do that I get it bc some people can be very uhh vocal and mean about their thoughts and I understand if you don’t want to be harassed in the notes. Thank you for placing your trust in me. This spiralled again into a longer than necessary post about historiography, but I really enjoyed writing it and I hope you enjoy reading it too. For those of you unfamiliar with the controversy, basically there are some visual similarities between historically upper class hanbok (Korean national dress) and Ming Dynasty hanfu (Chinese national dress) styles, and nationalists from both countries would sometimes pick fights on the internet to dispute ownership or claim that the other country had ‘copied’ or ‘stolen’ their culture (though as a Chinese person I’ve seen more examples of the Chinese side doing this, not sure how big of a thing this actually is on the Korean internet). Instead of running you through a comparison of the two systems of clothing (for which please consult this post by @fouryearsofshades), I want to take a look at the historiographical concepts that enable this to be a thing in the first place. Top Google image search result, perfectly encapsulates this madness. In short, I think this ‘discourse’ is really dumb and shouldn’t exist, because it’s forcing modern (specifically 19th and 20th century) concepts like nationhood onto pre-modern phenomena that existed for very different reasons. I’ve discussed in this post that ‘hanfu’ in the meaning we know it as today was only popularized in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and it appears that ‘hanbok’, while older, was also a nationalist invention of the early 20th century to differentiate Korean dress from Western and Japanese dress in a context of anti-imperial struggle (according to Wikipedia the most trusted of sources). The words ‘hanfu’ and ‘hanbok’ are both modern era neologisms far younger than the things they claim to represent. It makes sense for hanfu and hanbok to be modern terms since they both represent ‘national’ dress, and would not have been possible in pre-modern eras when the concept of ‘nations’ itself was not yet in the public consciousness. While nowadays nationalists could see the dress of their countries as separate, individual systems with roots that can be traced to somewhere within the more or less arbitrarily drawn borders of their modern countries, that was not quite how things functioned historically. Prior to the popularization of the idea that all ‘Chinese’ people, however they were defined, belonged to one ‘nation’ in the late 19th century, Chinese society was strictly hierarchical (like most places before the modern era) and what clothes one wore were dictated by one’s position in society, depending on class, gender, age etc.. It should be noted that saying something is an invention or social construct doesn’t automatically mean it’s bad or not real, it’s simply an invitation to examine its rhetoric more critically and be aware of when it can be used for harm, which is the case with this controversy. Few would think of the clothing worn by a labourer and a high ranking official as having belonged to the same system of dress, unless they were juxtaposed with an ethnic other. I have previously attributed this similarity to ‘cultural exchange’, which I would like to retract after further thought, as I now think this was due to Chinese imperialism and the power imbalance that placed China at the center and its vassals at the periphery. Let me recount a brief history of how Chinese and Korean dress ended up in their afterlives as hanfu and hanbok. There were often more similarities between aristocratic dress of the various sinosphere countries (China, Korea, Vietnam) than between different social classes within any particular one. BS has its roots in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). During the Ming Dynasty, Chinese imperialism functioned through the tributary system; tributary countries would send entourages to the Chinese court, where an exchange of gifts would be made that symbolized the contract between lord and vassal. Unlike later Western models of imperialism, this system stressed the superiority of Chinese culture and civilization over physical or economic exploitation. Dress was an important part of the contract between China and Korea, and among the gifts presented to Korea were fabrics and ready-made clothing for royals and officials. The current hanfu vs. The ‘Han’ or ‘Chinese’ character of these clothes was not a national one either, as it was limited to the aristocracy and more of a uniform of sorts with heavy political symbolism. This was because the ‘restoration of Han dress’ was used by the first emperor Hongwu as a legitimizing force for his dynasty, and the gifting of new ‘Han’ designs to the Yi’s of Joseon was a reward for their aid in overthrowing the previously ruling Mongols. The Korean aristocracy and civil officialdom adopted Ming style dress not because they were imitating Chinese ‘nationality’ or even fashion, but because upper class Chinese culture, which included dress and language (written Classical Chinese), was considered prestigious within the imperialist framework. Korea was one of the, if not the most, important tributaries of the Ming, but despite the surface level friendship the two countries were not on equal footing. The Korean elite’s anxiety regarding their subordinate status and attempts at nation building could be found throughout the Ming period itself, notably in the creation of the Korean script in the 15th century, which gave written form to the vernacular spoken by the classes that did not use Classical Chinese. There was no doubt that the Ming was the lord and Joseon the vassal; the tributary trip was made to Beijing, not Seoul. The common peoples of China and Korea didn’t share clothing styles at all, with the exception being a brief period in the 1470s and 80s when skirts puffed with horsehair imported from Korea became fashionable in China, which was a short lived bourgeois fad. I’ve seen some people use this to argue that all Ming style hanfu in fact originated in Korea, which makes no sense because 1) the Ming Dynasty did not begin in the 1470s and 80s 2) what was popular in two decades was not representative of three centuries. This is why the spread of Chinese style court dress to Korea could not be considered ‘cultural exchange’, since there was a clear power imbalance. After the establishment of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), a new Manchu system of dress was developed for the Chinese aristocracy and civil officialdom. The Joseon rulers refused to adopt this and used the continuation of Han dress as a source of legitimacy, styling themselves as the spiritual successor to the Ming. Joseon court dress became simulacra in a way, copies of originals that no longer existed (not a bad thing!). As the Qing Dynasty progressed, what previously symbolized loyalty to China now symbolized defiance, even though Korea was also nominally a tributary to the Qing, because the idea of ‘China’ itself had changed. The question of whether the Manchu-led Qing Dynasty could be considered ‘China’ was to become a running theme in 19th and 20th century nationalism. This set it apart from its original form at the end of the Ming, rendering the claim that modern representations of it in hanbok being fossils of Ming court dress absolutely incorrect. All of this eventually became irrelevant as both China and Korea fell victim to Japanese and Western imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, nullifying all previous relationships between lord and vassal. Joseon court dress underwent some changes during the Qing (notably the raised waistline), a process now considered a ‘nationalizing’ one. This was the era when the concept of nationhood entered the common lexicon. Considering that modern hanbok encompassed just about everything people in Korea wore in lieu of Western or Japanese dress, it also included the dress of the aristocracy and civil officialdom which closely followed Chinese precedent in the Ming Dynasty. Modern hanbok was developed in this period of reaction to imperialism, flattening the clothes worn by all classes of Korean society into one unified ‘national’ dress. The reason why a perceived similarity between Ming and Joseon court dress became an issue in recent decades was that Ming court dress was scooped out of obscurity by the Hanfu Movement. In the early 20th century when this happened, the similarity to Ming court dress was likely a non issue as 1) no section of Chinese society dressed that way and Chinese dress was portrayed very differently at the time, causing no clashes 2) fashion history was a non existent field of study in either country, making the relationship between Ming and Joseon court dress and the actual visual appearance of Ming court dress obscure concerns. In the revolutionary atmosphere of late 19th and early 20th century China, dress had not been used extensively as a rallying point for nationalism, mostly because people had an awareness that the clothes they were wearing at the time were of Manchu ethnic origin (especially menswear). Considering that Chinese nationalism of the era was heavily anti-Manchu, contemporary Chinese dress could not be used to make ‘national’ dress. Chinese nationalists at the turn of the 20th century took a different route to modernizing clothing, namely by using Chinese construction methods to create clothing suitable for ‘modernity’ instead of fossilizing native dress and adopting Western dress as the modern standard. Individual garments like cheongsam, changshan and the Zhongshan suit later rose to prominence as representations of Chinese national character, but they never formed a coherent system of dress like hanbok or kimono did. Instead, Han ethnic identity was often represented by guzhuang and opera costumes (I cannot make this up), which were imagined to be retrieved from a pre-Manchu past. For most of the 20th century, Chinese people were at peace with being represented by clothes with supposedly Manchu features, since they were indeed clothes actually worn by Chinese people and a part of the Chinese lived experience, and there were no viable alternatives as archaeology and fashion history were not yet fully developed fields. There were isolated efforts to revive ‘ethnically Han clothing’ but none of them took on. It should be noted that while in the eyes of the Hanfu Movement, 20th century clothing like cheongsam and changshan look very ‘Manchu’ and not Han enough, to nationalists in the 20th century they were modern garments distinct from Qing Dynasty dress and practices (notably the pigtail and foot binding), which alone took on the burden of bearing all of the associations of savagery and barbarism assigned to us by Western colonizers. This changed with the inception of the Hanfu Movement in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which was more interested in origins than contemporary ethnography. Hanfu was very preoccupied with history and more accurately a revival, since it happened way after Chinese people had commonly adopted Western dress, unlike kimono or hanbok which were efforts to preserve existing native dress. The Hanfu Movement was initially not interested in the Ming Dynasty, as it was considered to be riddled with Mongol influence and not Han enough for nationalist tastes. However, this changed with fashion history publications about Ming costume like the iconic Q版大明衣冠图志 from 2011, which catapulted the Ming to canonical status in online nationalist myth in the 2010s. The epic tale of the Ming as the last Han-ruled dynasty overrun by ‘barbarians’ and the tragic death of Emperor Chongzhen suited the nationalist obsession with martyrdom perfectly. The current century saw an increase in fashion history scholarship, made possible by Shen Congwen’s ground-breaking encyclopaedia of Chinese historical dress (which didn’t exactly age well) from the 1970s and modern archaeology; the excavation of Emperor Wanli’s tomb at Dingling in the 1950s provided much information for Ming court dress. Basically, as information about Ming Dynasty dress became more readily available, it became increasingly visible within the Hanfu Movement itself. There were a variety of factors contributing to the popularity of hanfu, I think the lack of a coherent system of national dress with a recognizable name was one of them. Most Chinese people had seen Korean period dramas and had an established idea of what hanbok looked like (the anachronistic use of modern hanbok for media set in much earlier parts of the Joseon period is a problem for the Korean costuming industry to consider) but Ming style hanfu was this new thing that no one had heard of. Ming style hanfu became very popular and there were some within the hanfu community who would like to see it become the new representation of Chinese national dress, but the obvious problem was that it looked suspiciously similar to portrayals of hanbok in tv and film. I’m aware that I’m coming from a very Chinese perspective on this, mostly because I experienced it myself, but also because it’s interesting how before confronting people from other countries, hanfu enthusiasts had to first convince their ‘fellow countrymen’ of the legitimacy of their own endeavors. So naturally many people judged Ming style hanfu against their existing knowledge and jumped to the conclusion that it looked like hanbok. There were multiple reactions to and lines of reasoning for this perceived similarity, all of which are fascinating. It shows national identity in the making, as it took quite some time for hanfu to become a socially acceptable representation of Chinese national identity. And then there’s the separate but equal line which claims there are few to no similarities, and that hanfu and hanbok are distinct national cultures. Starting with the nationalist camp, there’s the pseudo anthropological stance that hanbok originated in the Ming and nicely preserved ‘our culture’ for us; what we see in hanbok is actually an earlier stage of our own fashion history. And then there’s the disturbing imperialist line that correctly identifies some hanbok styles as results of Chinese imperialism during the Ming, but then go on to argue that imperialism is good actually and glamorize the liege-vassal relationship between the Ming and Joseon, jin dynasty hanfu or even call for the return of such a relationship in the modern day (I’ve seen some wild shit). Moving on to the cosmopolitan camp. Most people in this camp argue that ethnic purity is impossible to achieve in national dress systems and that cross cultural disseminations inevitably happen, which is obviously better in intention but I think lacks a critical examination of the concept of national dress itself and historical power imbalances. How should we approach this controversy? None of these positions take into account that national and historical are not one and the same. When people ask ‘how are hanfu and hanbok different’, first we need to clarify what exactly they are referring to with ‘hanfu’ and ‘hanbok’, since they are both national dress categories that encompass a variety of things from a vast span of time before the modern era, tied together only through the nationalist imagination. I myself couldn’t help but be specific when introducing this controversy, specifying that the source of controversy lies in ‘Ming style’ hanfu and the hanbok styles taken from the upper classes, because otherwise the comparison wouldn’t make sense. Nobody compares Song style hanfu with peasants’ hanbok. Here the framework of national culture becomes absolutely useless if not outright misleading. Yes, hanfu and hanbok are useful as representations of modern identities, but a question such as ‘why the 21st century continuation of a late19th/early 20th century representation of a style of dress originating in the Ming court in the 14th century that was Koreanized throughout the ensuing five centuries or so looked similar to 21st century recreations of Ming court dress made for consumerism’ calls for an investigation of the historical thing they represent not the representations themselves. Whereas the association with the Ming was something prized by the Korean elite during the Ming and Qing, that is no longer the case nowadays because upper class Chinese culture (if it even still exists) has long lost its prestige. Neither hanfu nor hanbok are natural extensions of national character because national character isn’t a tangible real thing that exists, it’s socially constructed through collective effort and its meaning changes over time, as I have tried to illustrate in the previous sections. The concept of nationhood didn’t exist in the Ming, the period where the clothing styles in question emerged, and it meant nothing to the aristocratic classes of the Ming and Joseon who wore them. Whereas in the imperial era having influenced others was a source of power and control, modern Chinese nationalism prizes complete ownership and independence over anything else because of Western ideas about national culture. If anything, the existence of a hanbok vs. Going forward I do want to see a more critical reexamination of the effects of Chinese imperialism prior to the 19th century though. None of this would have been an issue if they were friendly. Both the fact that Chinese imperialism was often so… And I must not forget to mention the most important piece of context driving this whole fiasco: China and South Korea are not exactly friendly because of lingering Cold War era hostility. Fashion history has never been what’s at stake here. This controversy is one of those things that tell us more about the desires of the people participating in it than the objects they quarrel over themselves. Chinese and Korean nationalists have been fighting each other on the internet over heritage stuff unrelated to clothing for ages now, if they weren’t fighting over hanfu and hanbok they’d be fighting over some other trivial shit. The thing with representations is that they’re not equivalent to the thing they claim to represent, and there can exist multiple interpretations of the same source material. I haven’t had the opportunity to talk about national dress in North Korea yet, because let’s not forget there are still two Koreas. Hanbok is a representation of Korean dress as worn in the early 20th century, not Korean dress itself, and the North calls their representation of it joseon-ot. I never see any Chinese nationalists have beef with joseon-ot, especially since it’s also the name of the ethnic dress worn by ethnic Korean minorities in China. So I guess the best way to approach the ‘hanfu vs. ’ discourse is to not engage at all because it’s not a valid comparison to begin with. I think that explains everything. The very nature of hanfu and hanbok as modern flattenings of historical reality for national identity (neutral) means that they are best left to be explored on their own. Study of the interchange of dress in sinosphere countries in the imperial era is the stuff of fashion history not national clothing categories.

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