"A woman like water, a mind like water, wearing a cheongsam is a perfect and mature classic."
Reading the cheongsam, the golden plum blossom has been for nearly twenty years.
In her heart, the qipao is not just "one of the important representatives of traditional Chinese women's clothing". Each traditional cheongsam is a work of art – a work of art tailored to show the beauty of Chinese women.
In 2004, after inadvertently entering the first qipao collection, Jinmei was out of control, and over the years, it has successively collected more than 600 pieces of qipao from the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China, which cost a lot of money and is known as "the first person to collect qipao in Yunnan".
The cheongsam is in the hands of Jin Mei, and it also jumps out of the investment and profit fate that the collection should have. For more than a decade, Jinmei has taken more than 600 pieces of traditional qipao as the research object, and has carefully studied and sorted out the selection of materials to design and then to the production process. Nowadays, she wears a belly of "qipao culture", from the city to the village, to teach women of all ethnic groups the skills of qipao making, while achieving creative transformation and innovative development of the excellent traditional culture of the nation, helping rural revitalization and women's entrepreneurship and employment.
Met
Jin Mei always remembers her "April day on earth".
It was a late spring in 2004, and in an antique shop in the alley next to the New Southwest Building in downtown Kunming, Jin Mei saw a Qing Dynasty cheongsam. "It's a brocade texture, and I was deeply attracted at first sight, it was really 'like you, it doesn't make sense', and the willingness to buy it and take it away is very strong." Recalling the chance encounter with the Qing Dynasty qipao, Jin Mei still enjoys the bargain with the shopkeeper at that time. In her words, the mood at that time was like a child who went to school for a day and came home and suddenly found chocolate cake on the table.
It was also at this time that Jin Mei's life appeared at an inflection point, as if there was an invisible "hand of heaven", which led her to resolutely embark on the road of qipao collection. For a period of time, she wandered the antique streets of Kunming, going door to door to ask about the qipao, and enjoyed it. Over time, her relatives and friends, and even many antique shop owners, knew her hobbies, and she would be notified of good collections first, and she would always buy them without hesitation. Over the years, she pocketed more than 600 high-quality cheongsams of the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China scattered in Yunnan, spending millions of dollars. In Yunnan, Jinmei is one of the best in the number of qipao collections; looking at the whole country, there are not many collectors with hundreds of traditional qipao.
"Is this money bad for buying a house or a car?" "High-end taste, tired of life."
In the eyes of relatives and friends, Jin Mei, who does not take the usual path, bought a bunch of old clothes and rotten shirts that are difficult to make a second profit, and the money is not worth it. But what is less known is that collecting the qipao is not Jin Mei's whim, and she was actually "planted" by the qipao very early.
Jin Mei's ancestors were Manchus, and because of his sympathy for the Reformers, he was demoted to Yunnan as an official, and settled in Kunming. After entering the Republic of China, the elders of the family continued the custom of wearing long robes and horse coats and cheongsam. When Jin Mei was a child, she looked at many old photos left at home and was deeply impressed by her grandmother and other elders wearing cheongsam.
In the photo, under the "blessing" of the qipao, they exude a unique oriental female beauty that belongs to that era. "Unique, difficult to copy, and very different from the temperament and charm of modern women who wear ready-to-wear (i.e., mass-produced modern clothing)." Jin Mei said that there is a cheongsam top left by her grandmother at home, the embroidery is three-dimensional, "after putting it on, the neighbors did not say that it was beautiful."
"Good looking" is abstract. Does clothes make people, or do people make clothes? With such a question, Jin Mei began to explore the charm of the cheongsam.
The teachers dye the cloth
explore
The qipao picks people, and wearing the qipao does not mean that you can wear the qipao well.
"The upper body of the cheongsam can quickly lift the spirit of women." Some people say that a well-educated Chinese woman has an unusual charm as soon as she dips on the qipao. But whether you can hold this elegant rhyme is also closely related to a woman's inner beauty.
"The robe is on the body, the steps are not big, and I can only take small steps." If coupled with appropriate hairstyles, jewelry, umbrella bags, incense fans, and elegant gestures, the feminine temperament of Chinese women can be fully revealed. In Jin Mei's view, clothing is one of the important carriers of national traditional culture, and the qipao epitomizes the aesthetic purpose and value orientation of traditional Chinese culture. For every cheongsam she recovered, she took "three-step" measures: cleaning and disinfection, quality identification, and meticulous preservation. In Jinmei's studio, more than 600 cheongsams are in their place, just like a vinyl record that has been washed and polished by the years, so that people can easily cross the barrier of time and space between touch and appreciation, and find the long-lost "quiet good years". She confessed that for those collections that she liked very much, she would "greedily" leave them only for herself to try on, and enjoy the hard-won nobility and elegance.
In order to decipher the past and present lives of the qipao culture, in addition to extensive reading of relevant materials, Jin Mei also specially studied an eco-museology graduate student to enhance her professional appreciation and discernment of cultural relics. With the gradual deepening of exploration, Jin Mei has formed a series of research results on the qipao, and clarified many previous misreadings about the qipao. For example, the qipao cannot simply be equated with the qing Dynasty Manchu women's flag painting. In fact, the qipao has gone through a rather long process from its appearance to its popularity. Its history can be traced back to the "deep clothes" of the pre-Qin period, the Manchu ancestors who lived in the white mountains and black waters, influenced by the costume culture of other nationalities, and gradually formed their own dress style - flag dress.
After the establishment of the Qing Dynasty, the flag dress became the exclusive costume of the nobility, and had an important influence on the design and production of the costumes of various ethnic groups in China. "To this day, the traditional costumes of the Dai, Lahu, Yi, Brown and other ethnic groups in Yunnan still use some traditional qipao production processes, and the design also draws on the style and elements of the qipao." It can be said that the qipao is a concrete reflection of the cultural exchanges and blending of various ethnic groups in China.
The qipao we often say today is a major improvement made by the designers of the Republic of China on the basis of the flag clothing of the Qing Dynasty. "Bound by feudal etiquette, the traditional flag dress has always been straight, the chest, shoulders, waist, hips are completely straight, and the curves of women's bodies are not exposed." Jin Mei introduced that after the establishment of the Republic of China, in Shanghai, where Chinese and Western cultures gathered, seamstresses combined Chinese and Western clothing production styles to promote the birth of The Haipai qipao. "The production of the cheongsam has since entered the era of three-dimensional modeling, the length of the clothes, the length of the sleeves are large and shortened, the waist is more fit, and the beauty of women's shapes can be displayed." It was both a clothing improvement and a women's liberation movement. ”
As soon as the Haipai qipao was born, it was sought after by celebrities, and began to occupy the center of the Chinese women's clothing stage in the 1930s, and reached its peak in the 1940s, becoming the representative of Chinese women's clothing. Like Chinese characters, red lanterns, dragon and lion dances, it has become an important symbol of Chinese telling the outside world about the humanistic history of their country and nation.
Inheritance
"There are many ethnic groups in Yunnan, and the cultures of various ethnic groups have been continuously exchanged and integrated on the red clay plateau, forming a diversified and integrated Yunnan culture." In Jin Mei's view, the good nature and climate of Yunnan provide unique conditions for the preservation of traditional qipao; and the colorful national culture has also contributed to the characteristics of Yunnan qipao with a wide variety and rich styles. "To have so many qipao collections, it seems accidental, but it is inevitable." To a certain extent, the qipao carries the common historical and cultural memory of all ethnic groups in Yunnan. ”
Disc buckles made by students
It is better to have fun alone than to have fun with all.
Jin Mei, who understands the background of the qipao, self-financed the establishment of the "Xike Qipao Theme Art Museum" in 2013, with the mission of exhibiting the qipao and excavating, sorting and studying the traditional qipao costume culture in Yunnan, and the art museum has also become the first public welfare institution in China to train traditional qipao design and production craftsmen for the society. At the same time, Jin mei has provided public lectures on qipao culture in many universities in the province and "intangible cultural heritage" and cultural and creative industry bases in various places for many years, sharing her research experience with the public, and opening an open class on "Yunnan Qipao Culture" in the lecture hall of Yunnan Academy of Arts.
The trainees made cheongsams made of Bai soil dye cloth
However, she is not willing to write down the relevant research results only on paper, but tries to combine cultural research with industrial development, and takes a practical path of creative transformation and innovative development of national traditional culture.
Under her influence and drive, a group of people with the same hobbies have successively joined the research and production team of the qipao. In recent years, Jin Mei has opened a small workshop at the foot of Kunming's West Mountain, and several professional tailors with more than 20 years of experience in clothing production, using the authentic qipao of the Republic of China period as the "mother gene", inheriting and copying more than 60 traditional qipao, the qipao they copied, together with the qipao collection, has been exhibited in Guangdong, Beijing, Shanghai and other places for many times, and has appeared on the stage of large-scale cultural activities such as "Silk Road Yunsheng Kunming National Fashion Week", which has attracted the attention of all walks of life. The Xike Qipao Theme Art Museum has also become famous because of this, attracting some cultural scholars and costume research enthusiasts from all over the country and even abroad to visit and exchange.
"The qipao is a piece of clothing worn by Chinese women in their lives, it is a piece of clothing that has more than 20 sizes from top to bottom, which meets the needs of women's figure, identity and dress." On Jinmei's training lesson plan, the bits and pieces of the qipao are recorded in detail. In 2016, Jin Mei made up her mind to quit her job and open a school of learning. She continued to go deep into ethnic minority areas to visit villages and villages, collect the characteristic elements of traditional costumes of ethnic minorities in Yunnan, and strive to make the qipao interpret richer styles, colors and production techniques through comparative research, and successively trained more than 100 rural women and laid-off female workers in Zhaotong, Xishuangbanna, Songming, Chengjiang and other places to promote women's entrepreneurship and employment.
In 2018, after strict review and approval by experts, Jinmei was identified by the relevant departments at the higher level as a county-level "non-hereditary inheritor of traditional qipao production" and incubated the first "traditional qipao production intangible cultural heritage project" in Songming County, and Jinmei's qipao production and learning hall also landed in Songming. "The concern and love of the party and the government for the traditional culture of the nation and the affirmation of our work have made me feel even more responsible, and we must do a good job in inheriting and carrying forward the traditional culture of the nation." Over the past two years, with the help and guidance of the Provincial Ethnic and Religious Commission, the production of qipao as a rescue and protection project for the traditional skills and skills of ethnic minorities has been successfully carried out in Songming County, and the endangered craft of making the national flag robe in the late Qing Dynasty and the Minguo flag has been passed on in the form of teaching and training, attracting hundreds of local people of all ethnic groups, mainly Miao women, to participate.
To Jin Mei's delight, there are many young people among the women who participated in the training. "My wish is to cultivate a group of outstanding young inheritors for Yunnan through my own efforts, so that the traditional craftsmanship of qipao can be passed on, and then promote the development of Yunnan's clothing culture industry, so that the beautiful qipao will become a cultural business card of Yunnan."
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Producer 丨 Na Mengyue Editor 丨 Wang Yifan, Xu Yongjin