Class and Gender:The Western Recontextualized Design of Chinese Panel Skirts in 20th Century and Taking Two Women's Skirts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the US as an Example
By examining two Western-style women's dresses that were cut and redesigned from Chinese horse-face skirts collected by the Metropolitan Mu-seum of Art,this paper reveals the design ways of cutting and redesigning traditional Chinese clothing in the West,and places them in the social background of fashion,to explore the social factors that facilitated their design forms and the cultural significance presented after being recontextualized in the West.The research shows that the two women's dresses are the products of Western absorption of Chinese costume aesthetics during a specific historical period,and the design forms they show are closely related to the differences between Chinese and Western dress culture and the fashion background at that time.They played roles in shaping the elite identity of the wearers in the cross-cultural context,and were also the aesthetic support for promoting the return of Western fashion to the femi-nine family image in the 1950s.