Over the last two decades our comprehension of clothing as significant indicators of social and economic change has deepened significantly. Scholars have recorded and analysed clothing mores across a variety of periods and places and, as regards China, the western public's perception of these matters has been heightened by the breathtaking cinematographer's art in such films as Wong Kar-wai's In The Mood For Love (2000) and Ang Lee's Lust, Caution (2007). This latter film is based on an unsettling short story by Eileen Chang, also known by her Chinese name, Zhang Ailing (1920–1995), a writer well-known to the Chinese Diaspora for her evocation of a feminine insular world. In 1943 she first penned in English, then subsequently revised in Chinese, what was to become a seminal article on fashion. This captured the subject's contradictions and dilemmas and it is these aspects of Chinese dress that Antonia Finnane addresses in her book Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation. Indeed, her title echoes that of Eileen Chang's revised Chinese article which was called Gengyi ji [‘A Chronicle of Changing Clothes’].

The opening sentences of Chang's article paint a picture of the traditional annual airing of clothes. She imagines herself walking through a tunnel of silk garments strung up on bamboo poles and she muses that women of the imperial age were not worried by the vagaries of fashion. In this, she was falling in with the idea of China as a static society. Antonia Finnane, challenging this construction of history and refuting the notion that there was no such thing as Chinese fashion, offers up plenty of evidence for nuanced changes of taste even for the early modern period. She cites the phrase xinqi, here translated as ‘new and strange’ but perhaps more pertinently rendered as ‘new and original’, as a frequent qualifier of clothes in late Ming texts. A type of hat, the Chunyang hat, is given as one instance of such novelty. It is hard to imagine what this hat, named after a Daoist immortal, might have looked like. Its style apparently echoed those of the Han and Tang periods while yet being up-to-the-minute. Young men of seventeenth-century China took it up, presumably until something newer and stranger came along. The desire for variation in dress styles is also chronicled for another era perceived as offering little opportunity for sartorial fluctuations. The dress of the Mao years from 1949 was often unimaginatively utilitarian but Antonia Finnane has consulted a range of sources, both textual and visual, that undermines the supposed uniformity of the period. For the 1950s she recounts the attempts by the artist and designer, Yu Feng (b.1916), to beautify women's clothes while ensuring they remained appropriate for a socialist society. Her design solutions, many making reference to folk and minority culture, sought to emphasise the Chinese aspects of dress though the high collar and the one-piece qipao (or cheongsam) dress were not styles that lent themselves to the frugal and practical lives that Chinese women were exhorted to lead. Politics, however, in the form of the ill-starred Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), overtook attempts at dress reform. Yu Feng's sensitive designs do not seem to have been taken up. The vestiges of her ideas lingered on in the flower sprays embroidered on the shoulders of silk blouses and pyjamas though these items were mainly produced for export and were not generally available within mainland China. Although dress as a subject in its own right was subsumed in the Maoist doctrine of ‘planned behaviour’ during the Cultural Revolution period, Antonia Finnane shows us how clothes and the desire for them persisted at this turbulent time now enshrined by the communist state as the ten years between 1966 and 1976. Increasing evidence in the form of a plethora of memoirs, some published with a western audience in mind, give us a glimpse of this highly charged world. Young people especially yearned to wear army chic and to signal to their peers, by the detailing of their garments, that they belonged to a particular gang. Army surplus, which was supposed to go for car-cleaning rags, was siphoned off to satisfy the uniform craze.

The best part of this book is that devoted to the Republican period (1911–1949) and the years just prior to it (Chapters 4–7). Not only in China but also world-wide, dress at this time was caught up in debates about how to be modern. Issues of gender, economics and imperialism were all reflected in clothing choices. It was the beginning of a process that, by the end of the twentieth century, was to see people in most parts of the world dressed in the same type of clothes. In China, were long gowns for men effeminate or markers of Chinese identity? Would western suits and uniforms appear more progressive? Was the woman's qipao a solution to national attire or a controversial garment that overexposed female bodies? How did bobbed hair, brassieres and bound feet coexist? Antonia Finnane expertly relates the multiple conflicting views surrounding these questions and she has hunted down many sources unfamiliar to all but the specialist historian. These help us make sense of the ramifications and one example, particularly well chosen, reminds us of the necessity not to seize upon the first engaging snippet when writing the history of dress. Oei Hui-lan (1899–1992), the daughter of a hugely rich sugar magnate and wife of the Chinese diplomat, Wellington Koo, published two autobiographies. In the first, from 1943, she clearly revelled in the fashion scene of Shanghai in the 1920s and 30s while in the later one, published in 1975, she rather denigrated it.

The book is full of illustrations. There is hardly a page without at least one picture to illuminate the text and each image is aptly and informatively captioned. The words themselves will repay several readings and it is perhaps a work to return to rather than read at a sitting. Changing Clothes in China is about the discourse surrounding clothes rather than the clothes themselves. The author quite correctly dismisses the very many near-identical dragon robes, outnumbering other styles of Chinese dress in museum collections, as having misled us about the existence of fashion in China. Had she been able to engage more fully with the rather more diverse material evidence which does survive, it would have arguably given even more weight to this rigorously argued and impeccably resourced publication.