Fashion

Into the limelight

By Ji Tao (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-06-01 08:25

BYLINE  JI TAO

I had one of my early fashion experiences watching a Chinese movie in a small cinema back in my hometown in Anhui province 27 years ago.

Trendy Red Dress is a light-hearted story about a group of young women working at a textile factory in Shanghai. They abandon the almost unisex dress code of blue and gray imposed by the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) and go for beautiful dresses along with a newly liberated sense of style.

The film revolves around a sleeveless red silk dress with a slightly broad neckline, which was introduced from some southern coastal city where the country's reform and opening-up policy was initiated a few years earlier.

It becomes the secret craze of these women, but some are afraid of being mislabeled because Western-styled dresses were categorized as an "evil" of capitalist society and associated with decadence and frivolity.

Eventually, one of the women is brave enough to wear the dress. The more relaxed social circumstances help usher the red dress trend on the streets.

The film is a far cry from Sex and the City or The Devil Wears Prada, worshipped by today's fashionistas. But Red Dress seems to carry much more significance for China's budding fashion scene almost 30 years ago.

Directed by Qi Xingjia, it is also considered the first Chinese movie with a fashion theme, which signifies the awakening sense of fashion at the beginning of the country's reform and opening-up, and encourages people to embrace new things and ideas.

But I only acquired this knowledge at a much later time.

Back then, I was only 13 and barely into puberty. But sitting in the dark in front of the screen, I still felt that something had changed about these women halfway through the movie.

In one scene, co-workers laugh at the protagonist, a good-looking model worker, for being too conservative when she appears with the much-talked-about red dress. She has altered the neckline and the sleeves to conceal her body. They help her rip off the excess cloth and push her to an amateur fashion show in a park.

The 1984 movie shifted to slow motion in the following scene, allowing audiences to fully savor the magic moment created by a piece of red dress. I held my breath in the dark.

Many years later, when I read the poem She Walks in Beauty by Lord Byron in my English literature class, the image surfaced again in my mind and reminded me of Red Dress. The woman's face has become blurry to me. But the moment of vertigo brought by her stunning beauty in the red dress remains fresh.

The transforming power of fashion struck me back then. In my mind, fashion has since been associated with confidence, elegance and above all, the beauty of women.

I covered the fashion beat intermittently at China Daily in the late 1990s. At that time, the beat was not busy enough to keep one fully occupied. I always looked for trends that could also reflect social and cultural changes, and women's attitude to life and love.

It was not always easy, as the country's fashion industry was taking baby steps and was often deemed not sophisticated enough to be covered for our English readers.

I tended to ask the same news peg from my reporters when I became an editor later. Fortunately, with the country's dynamic changes in every facet of society, China's fashion scene has moved from the symbolic to the substantial.

I believe fashion will become an even more exciting beat for reporters, who have also developed enough sophistication to make good calls - and not just hold their breath in the dark.

Ji Tao is features editor of China Daily.

(China Daily 06/01/2011 page49)