Indanthrene blue is not the first color that comes to mind when people picture the qipao, but it was one of the most-worn hues of 1930s Shanghai. The story runs through the current exhibition at the Shanghai Library’s Huaihai Road branch, “Hai Shang Yi Chuan: Modern Shanghai Dress Fashions in Historical Documents”, which fills the modern catalogs hall on the first floor with period photographs, magazine spreads and textile records, tracing how a city dressed itself over a century.
A Century in Two Hours
The lecture lands on August 22 at 2 p.m., when Miao Huicui (苗荟萃), a curator at the Shanghai University Museum, presents “Modern Shanghai Style: A Century of Fashion in the Shanghai-Style Qipao” (摩登海尚). Her specialty is textile and dyeing history and Shanghai-style dress culture, and her books include “Oriental Lace: A Century of Chinese Lace and Drawnwork” and a volume on velvet and carpet weaving in the “Ancient Chinese Silk Design Materials” series. She has curated three to five editions of the “Shanghai-Hong Kong Ladies’ Qipao” exhibitions. Her talk walks the silhouette’s evolution from the wide short-sleeved cut of the early years, to the fitted long qipao of the golden age, to the body-hugging styles that followed, reading each stage against the era’s ideas and tastes. The session runs 2 to 3:30 p.m. in the foreign-language sci-tech periodicals reading room on the third floor, seats 80, and registration is open from August 12 at 9 a.m. until August 22 at 1:30 p.m. Fans of the library’s stamp series can collect the returning 2025 “Modern Chapters” seal on lecture day.
Summer Dressing, Circa 1930
Mid-August brought a summer rotation to the exhibition walls, drawing on the library’s runs of The Young Companion (良友) and other period magazines. A Shanghai zhuzhi poem from the 1930s sets the tone: summer qipao cut from printed georgette, wide-legged trousers fluttering beneath, worn by women strolling the streets. Fabric mattered as much as cut. Gauzy silk and thin fabrics led the warm-weather choices, while machine-woven fine cotton plain weave appeared everywhere, from pale bamboo-colored cloth to the Indanthrene-dyed blue cottons prized by younger women for their plain look, light weight and breathability. The film star Bai Yang wore an Indanthrene blue short-sleeved qipao in the 1937 classic “Crossroads.”
Silhouette changes came fast in these pages. By the late 1920s women’s magazines were already noting that “the skirt has stolen the gown’s place”; the 1930s favored long flowing one-piece dresses with wider hems; and by the 1940s summer qipao turned sleeveless and lower-collared, simpler and easier to move in. The fitness craze pushed tennis dress and modern sportswear into the summer wardrobe, accessorized with wide-brimmed sun hats and printed folding fans. New additions to the display include a 1930s women’s short jacket from a private collection, “New Summer Fashions” from The Young Companion’s 1935 issue 107, and a 1935 summer-dress feature from another periodical.
Swimwear and the New Body
The exhibition gives generous wall space to a bolder chapter: the rise of women’s swimwear. From 1932, film actresses made swimming a public spectacle, with Li Lili, Wang Renmei and the Liang sisters posing in bathing suits for the pictorials and the “mermaid” swimmer Yang Xiuqiong chased by the press. The bathing suit itself moved from one-piece styles to halter and tie-side cuts, opened backs, and finally two-piece sets. Items on view include a full-length swimsuit portrait of the actress Li Zhuozhuo, a July 1932 group photo of Li Lili and the composer Nie Er at the Gaoqiao seaside resort, and a 1936 feature, volume 10, number 2, of Times magazine titled “The Evolution of Chinese Women: The Beauty of Swimwear Poses.” Together with the qipao on the adjacent walls, the exhibition reads as one continuous argument: Shanghai women of a century ago dressed for comfort, for movement and for the camera, and the qipao’s hundred-year career is part of that story.