Diagram: 杂裾垂髾服 (‘Flying Swallow’ Dress)
Slightly inspired by the dress-up interactivity of It’s the New Year! and partly inspired from watching Chinese period dramas and motivated by the Lunar New Year tradition of wearing new clothes… Here’s a little fruit after I did a little digging around for information! The ‘Flying Swallow’ dress had decorative fabrics and ribbons (usually silk) that would drag behind the wearer and fly freely in the wind - like swallows! It must have been an amazing dress, very carefully put together, in order to have had that visual effect. In any case, here’s a front-view dress-up model. You can use it like a diagram, or a slider! Enjoy making your own little dress!
Before we talk more about the dress… Help us prepare a #kindredpacket!
New year, new clothes, new opportunities and another year to share with others. To help us get into the spirit of giving back to our community especially during these difficult COVID times, we’re helping with the Kind Red Packet by releasing a few Lunar New Year themed printables! A Kind Red Packet is aiming to raise £2500 for our vulnerable folk and those struggling within our communities during these tough times. So if you enjoyed this printable or you enjoyed reading about how I created it, please direct your donations to a Kind Red Packet!
A little more about what I learnt…
I’m just going to put it out there: please take everything with a pinch of salt. I did my best with the research but my Chinese really isn’t up to scratch to touch more historical research and resources. To be honest, I didn’t really know where to go for more reliable information on this than Baidu and some other websites.
For the Lunar New Year, people usually buy new clothes to wear so I wanted to do something related with more traditional Chinese clothing (called hanfu) 汉服. (If you want a summary of the different types of hanfu 汉服, @culturedgen’s post is really good and does it in a neat timeline!)
I ended up looking into a famous painter called Gu Kaizhi 顾恺之 who was also a court official. One of his best known works are the Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies which is held in the British Museum and one of the scenes of the scroll can be viewed on the website. I based my dress (in much, much more simplified version that couldn’t possibly hold a candle to the painting it was inspired by) on that and stylised it as a cartoon. I believe, though I’m not sure, there seems to be a garment on the front that looks like it can be separately tied around the waist to which the ‘swallow-tails’ shao 髾 are attached to. There are also various ribbons xian 襳 flying from her arms and shoulders and her hair is adorned with a pink ornament.
It was a little difficult to find information that was accessible to a reader like me (much lacking in a more sophisticated Chinese proficiency) about the 杂裾垂髾服 and I couldn’t even find a translation for the style of dress! The literal translation would be something like ‘mixed gown hanging tail’. If you ever find something for this, please let me know! I don’t really enjoy not having the certainty of following historical/cultural names.
And a little side note about what I understood from the origins of the clothing… It appears that after the fall of the Han dynasty, Confucianism was no longer the dominant philosophy and philosophical Taoism began to become more popular. The clothing styles adapted to reflect the new aesthetics of the philosophy: free and flowing, upholding nature. So the ruqun 襦裙 (which is one of the eldest forms of hanfu 汉服) was adapted with these swallow tails and ribbons.
References
朝云辞，《飞霰[xiàn] 垂髾服（杂裾）》，爱汉服，<http://www.aihanfu.com/wen/5028/> [accessed 11/02/2021]
Various,《魏晋南北朝服饰》，百度百科，<https://baike.baidu.com/item/魏晋南北朝服饰> [accessed 11/02/2021]
‘Past Exhibition: Admonitions of the Instructress of Court Ladies’, British Museum [accessed 11/02/2021]
‘Gu Kaizhi Paintings’, China Online Museum, <http://www.chinaonlinemuseum.com/painting-gu-kaizhi.php> [accessed 11/02/2021]
Thanks for reading all of this if you’ve made it to this part! Please contact me with corrections where you think I’ve gone wrong! This was a little casual reading with my mum and dad so it is totally possible that we misunderstood or misread something!