Styling Shanghai is the first book dedicated to exploring the city's fashion cultures, examining its growing status as one of the world's foremost fashion cities. From its origins as an international treaty port in the 19th century, Shanghai has emerged as a global leader in the production, mediation and consumption of fashion. This book reveals how the material and imaginative context of this thriving urban centre has produced vivid interpretations of fashion as object, image and idea.Bringing together contributions by a range of leading international fashion historians and theorists, and drawing on extensive original research, Styling Shanghai offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the mega-city's shifting position as a fashion capital. Rooted in collaboration between leading UK, Australian and Shanghai-based institutions, it considers the impact of local and global textile manufacturing, the representation and marketing of 'Shanghai Style', bodies and gender in the 'Paris of the East', and the challenges of globalization, commercialization and digital communication in contemporary Shanghai.

List of IllustrationsNotes on ContributorsAcknowledgements1 Introduction - Christopher Breward2 A Century of Chinese Printed Textiles in Shanghai - Zhong Hong3 Wen Ming Xin Zhuang (New Enlightenment Clothes) - Liu Yu4 Shanghai Qipao 1925-49 - Bian Xiangyang and Yan Lanlan5 'Through The Maloo to the City': Fashion, Decadence and Dance culture in Shanghai in the early 20th century - Juliette MacDonald6 Soong Ching-ling, Soong May-ling: Negotiating Dresses and Politics in Modern Shanghai, 1913-49 - Djurdja Bartlett7 Image Makers of Fashionable Shanghai, 1910-30 - Chia-Ling Yang8 Lost in Socialist Transformation? Shanghai Style under Mao - Antonia Finnane9 'New for three years, old for three years, fix for another 3 years' - Anthony Bednall10 The Shanghai Dandy: Men in the City - Christopher Breward11 The Luxury Malling of Shanghai: Successes and Dissonances in the Chinese City - Agnès Rocamora12 'There will never be a Chinese Fashion' - Staking a claim for Shanghai as a Fashion City - Anja Aronowsky CronbergGlossaryNotesBibliographyIndex