China Chic

Explores the historical significance of Chinese clothing, and offers examples and commentary on fashions ranging from the dragon robes of the Imperial era to the cheongsams shown on the runways in Paris

East meets West in this award–winning book of Chinese style by superstar fashion designer Vivienne Tam–and now it's in a cute, smaller trim size trade paperback! Celebrated fashion designer Vivienne Tam shares the rare individuality of her own cross–cultural style, combining traditional eastern elements with a modern Western edge. The seductive East–meets–West style is brought alive as Tam takes us on a personal journey featuring the people, places, and things that inspire her. From the sexy cheongsam (the ultimate feminine dress) to the Mao jacket (gives power dressing a whole new meaning), from the elaborate Chinese opera houses to Zen gardens, she teaches such us how to savour the world in a bowl of noodles and the essence of Chinese design in her favourite Ming chair. China Chic is style that is hot, hip, and pervasive to today's–and tomorrow's–pop culture.

The Management Science Informatization and Economic Innovation Development Conference is a leading conference held annually. It aims at building an academic platform for the communication and academic exchange among participants from various fields related to management science informatization and economic innovation development. Here, scholars, experts, and researchers are welcomed to share their research progress and inspirations. It is a great opportunity to promote academic communication and collaboration worldwide. This volume contains the papers presented at the 4th Management Science Informatization and Economic Innovation Development Conference (MSIEID 2022), held during December 9th-11th, 2022 in Chongqing, China (virtual event). For the safety concern of all participants under nowadays situation, we decided to hold it as a virtual conference which is also effective and convenient for academic exchange and communication. Everyone interested in these fields were welcomed to join the online conference and to give comments and raise questions to the speeches and presentations.

Featuring over 200 stunning photographs, this Chinese design book captures the modern, yet nostalgic style of the Chinese home. Twenty-first century China is a country on the move. As it hurtles into the future, a new revolution- that of a fast growing creative movement - is taking place. As the country's enterprising designers draw on classical Chinese accents and blend these with modern dynamic ideas, the term "Made in China" becomes dramatically redefined to mean chic, refreshing, inspiring - and even astounding in the architectural arena, in particular inspiring new responses to modern living in China are emerging. Author Sharon Leece together with photographer Chester Ong, explore thirty-six of the most innovative homes and interiors in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Bulls in the China Shop is an engagingly anecdotal, lucidly written account of the tragicomic cultural and political misadventures that have plagues American commercial ventures over the past two decades in the People’s Republic of China. When diplomatic tensions between the two countries were eased in the 1970s, American businesses rushed to China, lured by the world’s largest national market. As they tried to introduce capitalism to China’s socialist society they soon discovered that the rules of business, as they understood them, did not apply. Chinese buyers placed huge orders for which they had no money to pay: Chinese marketing bore no relation to capitalist exigencies—playing cards were named “Maxipuke” (pu-ke: poker), designer men’s underwear, “Pansy”; million-dollar projects already underway were cancelled without warning. The Chinese, in turn, were astonished by the indiscretion of the Americans, who prized “directness” above all in negotiations and were at once brash and guileless in exposing weaknesses in their own bargaining positions. Like Mark Twain’s innocents, Americans were woefully ignorant of Chinese etiquette, and prone to embarrassing gaffes. And more: the Chinese found the American insistence on lengthy, detailed contracts fatuous, if not insulting. Bulls in the China Shop is a fascinating look at the uneasy commerce between American and China—between capitalism and socialism—and at the cultural, political, and historical significance of trade between the two nations.

For centuries China has fueled the creative imagination and inspired fashion. This stunning publication explores the influence of Chinese art, film, and aesthetics on international fashion designers, including Christian Dior, Jean Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld, Alexander McQueen, and Yves Saint Laurent.

Historians have long regarded fashion as something peculiarly Western. In this surprising, sumptuously illustrated book, Antonia Finnane challenges this view, which she argues is based on nineteenth- and twentieth-century representations of Chinese dress as traditional and unchanging. Fashions, she shows, were part of Chinese life in the late imperial era, even if a fashion industry was not then apparent. In the early twentieth century the key features of modern fashion became evident, particularly in Shanghai, and rapidly changing dress styles showed the effects. The volatility of Chinese dress throughout the twentieth century matched vicissitudes in national politics. Finnane describes in detail how the close-fitting jacket and high collar of the 1911 Revolutionary period, the skirt and jacket-blouse of the May Fourth era, and the military style popular in the Cultural Revolution gave way finally to the variegated, globalized wardrobe of today. She brilliantly connects China’s modernization and global visibility with changes in dress, offering a vivid portrait of the complex, subtle, and sometimes contradictory ways the people of China have worn their nation on their backs.

At the dawn of the 1930s a new empowered and liberated image of the female was taking root in popular culture in the West. This 'modern woman' archetype was also penetrating into Eastern cultures, however, challenging the Chinese and Japanese historical norm of the woman as homemaker, servant or geisha. Through a focus on the writings of the Western women who engaged with the Far East, and the Eastern writers and personalities who reacted to this new global gender communication by forming their own separate identities, Katrina Gulliver reveals the complex redefining of the self taking place in a crucial time of political and economic upheaval. Including an analysis of the work of Nobel Prize laureate Pearl S. Buck, The Modern Woman in China and Japan is an important contribution to gender studies and will appeal to historians and scholars of China and East Asia as well as to those studying Asian and American literature.