How China's Fashion Renaissance Became a Patriotic Statement

China’s shift from enforced Mao suit uniformity to vibrant historical fashion represents a generational embrace of cultural heritage that’s reshaping global fashion.

Summary of The Princesses of China. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:00:27 — Massive crowds of young women at Beijing’s tourist sites rent elaborate Ming dynasty costumes to photograph themselves for social media, creating traffic jams of elaborately dressed princesses.
• 00:02:04 — The popularity of historical costumes is directly inspired by a 2012 TV drama called ‘Empresses in the Palace’ about women competing for imperial favor, which drove fashion trends.
• 00:03:57 — Despite being a technologically advanced nation with electric vehicles and mobile payment systems, China’s fashion choices are surprisingly nostalgic rather than futuristic.
• 00:06:03 — The Ming dynasty, which lasted 276 years until 1644, is the most admired historical period for clothing because its styles are considered more beautiful than other dynasties.
• 00:06:39 — Hanfu refers to Han ethnic clothing and has become culturally significant because the Han represent over 90 percent of China’s population and feel their traditional styles were suppressed for centuries.
• 00:16:12 — From the 1950s through 1980s, the Mao suit enforced radical uniformity across Chinese society, with subtle deviations like unbuttoned jackets drawing criticism from neighbors and family members.
• 00:22:38 — President Xi Jinping proposed legislation in 2023 to ban clothing that damaged national spirit, but widespread public rejection on social media prevented it from passing.
• 00:25:17 — The hanfu movement is partly a state-encouraged shift away from Qing dynasty costume dramas because the government is sensitive about discussing that era’s history and territorial claims.
• 00:34:48 — Guochao describes the trend of combining traditional Chinese elements with modern fashion, though debate exists about whether Western brands using Chinese motifs qualify as authentic Guochao.

In depth

Why Ming, and why now: the hanfu boom as more than costume play

The host arrived in Beijing determined not to write about China, but the sheer scale of what she saw at the Forbidden City made that impossible: crowds of young women, mostly renting elaborate fur-trimmed robes and towering wigs, creating literal traffic jams around tourist sites 00:00:27. Her translator Yebu Ji is skeptical by temperament, describing himself as trained in cynicism, and initially frames this as straightforward social-media performance—dress up, take a photo, post it to Red Note 00:02:3100:02:39. But he also offers a more sympathetic reading: historical dress lets young Chinese people access a kind of freedom that talking about contemporary politics does not allow, since discussing the present is fraught while discussing the past feels safe 00:03:0600:03:13.

The specific trigger for this trend is traceable to a single hit television drama, Empresses in the Palace, a 2012 show about imperial concubines scheming and killing each other’s children for the emperor’s favor 00:02:0400:02:13. When asked directly whether the show inspired their costumes, women at the Forbidden City confirmed it did 00:02:26. That the aesthetic overwhelmingly gestures toward the Ming dynasty specifically is explained partly on visual grounds—informants told the host that Ming style is simply considered prettier, more ornate, more bell-sleeved and fur-lined than the alternatives 00:06:1600:06:23. But the host pushes back on that being the whole story, since the deeper reason is ethnic: Ming clothing is Han clothing, and the Han make up over 90 percent of the population, giving this particular period an outsized claim to being ‘authentically’ Chinese in a way other dynasties are not 00:06:3300:06:39.

What’s left genuinely unresolved is how much of this is really about ethnic identity versus simple escapism, comfort, or fashion trend-following. Professor Ke Ren later complicates the picture further, noting that some Australian scholarship reads the entire hanfu movement as an expression of Han chauvinism, while he sees it as messier—driven as much by comfort (hanfu is looser and more modest than qipao) and by a broader appetite for anything pre-modern, including Tang dynasty styles that aren’t technically Han-dynasty at all 00:29:5100:29:5900:30:21.

From Manchu robes to the little black dress: the qipao’s rise and quiet retirement

The qipao’s story runs in the opposite direction from hanfu’s. Casey Hall, an 18-year Shanghai resident and consumer journalist, walks through how the loose, boxy Manchurian robe—the standard dress of the ruling Qing dynasty—was gradually tailored tighter and shorter after the dynasty’s collapse in 1911 00:11:3000:11:39. What began as young women mimicking male intellectuals’ robes over trousers evolved, through the 1920s and 30s, into the fitted, high-slit silhouette now iconic in films like In the Mood for Love 00:11:5200:11:5700:12:11. Crucially, this transformation wasn’t just an aesthetic accident; it was explicitly tied to a political project of feminine modernity. Women shedding bulky, patriarchal dynastic dress for something sleek and body-conscious was a visible signal of independence, cosmopolitanism, and participation in Shanghai’s wild, foreign-inflected party culture of the 1930s 00:11:4400:11:4900:12:28.

After 1949, the qipao essentially vanished from the mainland—Antonia Finney, who taught in Shanghai in 1972, recalls a striking, almost total sartorial uniformity, with the dress surviving only in the diaspora, carried by tailors who fled to Hong Kong and beyond 00:15:1000:15:1800:15:2400:15:33. Its Hong Kong incarnation, technically called cheongsam rather than qipao, is what most Westerners picture when they think of ’the’ Chinese dress, even though the garment itself had by then evolved somewhat independently of its Shanghai origins 00:14:3400:14:38.

But today, back on the mainland, both Ivy and Casey are blunt: the qipao is for grandmas 00:24:0300:24:05. The explanation offered has two layers. Practically, younger women simply prefer hanfu’s comfort and modesty over the qipao’s tightness and exposure 00:30:1500:30:16. Politically, the deeper issue is etymological and historical—qipao literally means ’the robe of the Qi,’ i.e., the Manchu people, tying the dress irrevocably to the very dynasty that many Han-identifying Chinese now regard as a period of ethnic suppression, making it a poor candidate for anything resembling a national costume 00:24:4700:24:5700:25:05. That the qipao’s associations shifted from progressive and cosmopolitan to old-fashioned and ethnically fraught within a single century is left as an open irony rather than something anyone fully resolves.

The Mao suit’s enforced sameness—and why it never came back

Between the qipao’s disappearance and hanfu’s rise sits the era of the Mao suit, which the episode treats as the most extreme case study in how clothing can be politically weaponized without ever being formally mandated. From the 1950s through the 1980s, virtually everyone in China wore some variant of jacket and trousers, and Antonia Finney recalls that turning your head to notice someone dressed differently almost never happened 00:15:5900:16:0600:16:12. The garment’s actual name, the Zhongshan suit, traces back to Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the post-imperial republic—not to Mao—and it was originally loaded with civic symbolism: four pockets for four virtues, five buttons for a separation of powers, three cuff buttons for guiding principles 00:16:4200:16:5700:17:1900:17:26. Mao simply inherited a uniform that officialdom already wore, and it filtered down through a state workforce that eventually included railway workers, teachers, and police 00:17:4400:17:5400:18:10.

What makes this section of the story especially pointed is the mechanism of enforcement. There was no explicit law requiring the suit, yet deviation—something as small as leaving a jacket unbuttoned—invited correction from neighbors, spouses, even children 00:18:2300:18:5600:19:0700:19:10. Antonia Finney calls this a regime of fear in which people policed each other to avoid drawing attention that could bring trouble 00:19:3000:19:3300:19:38. A passage from the memoir Wild Swans, read aloud in the episode, captures how radical it felt for a woman to simply turn her collar out to reveal a flash of pink—an act of visible, nervous defiance in a system where sameness was safety 00:19:5100:20:0400:20:13.

The puzzle raised by Dutch correspondent Julie Blusset is why, fifty years after Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, the suit hasn’t cycled back into fashion the way retro styles typically do 00:20:4000:20:47. The answer the episode arrives at is that the suit is now the opposite of transgressive—wearing one today gets you stared at, not for looking rebellious but for looking strange 00:20:3000:20:34. Even a genuine collector, Deng, who loves the suits for their craftsmanship and durable materials rather than any nationalist sentiment, is too uncomfortable to wear his collection outside his home 00:21:5500:21:5800:22:02. The one prominent, occasional wearer is President Xi Jinping, and Julie Blusset reads this as a deliberate signal that he sees himself continuing Mao’s political lineage—though even she stops short of calling this a real fashion revival, since it remains confined to one man’s symbolic wardrobe 00:22:0800:22:1500:22:19.

Why the Qing dynasty became untouchable, and hanfu’s convenient timing

A recurring tension in the episode is that the Qing dynasty—the very empire whose territorial borders modern China still claims, including Tibet and Inner Mongolia—has become an awkward subject in Chinese popular culture rather than a celebrated one 00:31:0000:31:0400:31:13. Professor Ke Ren traces this shift to the New Qing History movement, largely built by North American scholars who studied Manchu-language sources and argued the Qing was ethnically and culturally distinct from a purely ‘Chinese’ empire rather than simply another Chinese dynasty 00:32:1600:32:2400:32:27. That scholarly reframing made Chinese authorities wary, since it complicates the narrative that Qing-conquered territories are naturally and eternally Chinese, turning Qing history into something the state would rather not have publicly debated 00:32:3800:32:4200:32:49.

This matters for fashion because, as Ren lays out, there was an earlier wave of enormously popular Qing-dynasty costume dramas in the late 1990s and 2000s, such as My Fair Princess, whose lookalike-princess plotlines worked well precisely because Manchu royal and commoner dress didn’t differ that drastically 00:31:3400:31:4000:31:4400:31:49. As Qing history became politically touchy, popular culture visibly pivoted away from it, and Ren suggests hanfu’s rise is not purely organic—it also functions as a state-tolerated, even quietly encouraged, redirection of historical costume enthusiasm toward the Han dynasties instead, sidestepping the Manchu question entirely while preserving the profitable costume-drama industry 00:32:5300:33:0200:33:1200:33:17.

The irony, which the episode does not let go unremarked, is that the aesthetic lines are blurrier than the politics suggests. The controversial Adidas jacket with knotted frog buttons draws internet fury for resembling Manchu magua styling, tied by critics to the ‘Century of Humiliation’ framing of Qing-era decline relative to the West 00:28:0700:28:1400:28:4300:28:48. Yet the qipao—equally Manchu in origin—remains beloved as bridal wear, and even the interviewee wearing it at her own engagement party sees no contradiction 00:24:0800:24:1100:29:09. Professor Ren resists a simple ‘Han chauvinism’ explanation for hanfu’s popularity, noting it also absorbs non-Han-dynasty aesthetics like Tang-style tourist dress in Xi’an, suggesting the movement functions as loosely as ‘anything old and pre-Qing’ rather than a coherent ethnic ideology 00:30:2900:30:3900:30:44.

Guochao, state-sponsored pride, and the limits of patriotic branding

The newest twist on all this history is guochao, a marketing and design movement blending traditional Chinese motifs with contemporary fashion, championed by young Chinese designers eager to prove that Chinese manufacturing means craftsmanship rather than just cheap production for export 00:34:4000:35:3500:35:4200:36:00. The luxury handbag brand Songmont is held up by multiple interviewees as an example done right—bags referencing kites, Tibetan beads, and other cultural touchstones subtly rather than as costume 00:36:3100:36:4000:36:47. But there’s real disagreement over guochao’s boundaries. Ivy and her boyfriend William bicker on-mic about whether Adidas, a Western company merely adding Chinese elements like a horse motif for Lunar New Year, deserves the guochao label at all, or whether that’s a superficial move by a fundamentally Western brand 00:34:5100:35:0200:35:1000:35:28.

The Chinese state has clear incentives to encourage this whole ecosystem, according to Professor Ren: fashion rooted in a long civilizational history helps project the idea that China commands global respect commensurate with its historical depth 00:37:1600:37:2100:37:24. That project dovetails with a genuine generational shift—young Chinese people who grew up amid rising prosperity feel an optimism and pride that Ren says is real, even as he gently cautions his own students against letting that pride calcify into simplistic nationalism that treats other countries only as foils rather than as complicated places in their own right 00:37:2800:37:3100:39:5600:40:05. Notably, the state’s appetite for controlling fashion has limits: Xi Jinping’s 2023 proposal to ban clothing deemed harmful to national feeling, seemingly aimed partly at gender-nonconforming dress, provoked enough public backlash online that it failed to pass—evidence, Julie Blusset argues, that the era of Mao-style sartorial regulation is permanently over, regardless of the government’s other ambitions 00:22:3800:22:4500:23:0200:23:11.

The host closes by reflecting on her own surprise at feeling toward China something like what she feels about her own messy, embarrassing, but beloved United States—an admission that complicates any tidy narrative about authoritarian control versus free expression 00:39:0500:39:2000:39:26. Julie Blusset makes an explicit comparison here too, noting that Western media’s constant self-criticism, like a Dutch newspaper’s takedown of its own childcare system, is a habit Chinese interviewees don’t have access to in the same way, which shapes how pride and dissent both get expressed through channels like clothing rather than public debate 00:38:0900:38:1500:38:38.

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.