Seeing Red

For me, the color red evokes the image of the red pocket. A red envelope embossed with gold designs that usually contains money, the red pocket is given out at Chinese New Year dinners to symbolize the transfer of good fortune. New Year’s dinner feels incomplete without family members fighting over the bill and older aunties giving out red pockets to all the kids, all while donning an absurd amount of red clothing. Red has become synonymous with luck in Chinese culture and somehow also indicative of China itself. A stroll through Chicago’s Chinatown requires walking through a large red gate in the heart of the district and past red railings and lanterns hanging in front of shop doors. It is clear, even in the infrastructure of the district itself that red holds importance in Chinese culture. The color is a key feature of the Western imagination of China, permeating multiple facets of Western culture, including fashion. 

Western fashion has long been influenced by “Oriental” aesthetics in an attempt to be fashion forward. This trend creates a contrast between the reality and the fictionalization of the East that reflects a long history of cultural ideas getting lost in translation between the East and West. For centuries, China’s silk trade, blue and white porcelain, calligraphy and mysticism have amazed Western designers. The very notion of the East as unrestrained and free, and the West as confined and orderly, plays heavily into the idea of Orientalism, as it implies that the East is a place where civilized Westerners may become unbound.  

In 1977, Yves Saint Laurent launched his Chinese inspired collection, dubbed “the Opium collection” due to Saint Laurent’s fascination with the Opium Wars in China. The Opium Wars were a series of attempts in the 1850s by the British empire to establish ports in China and legalize the opium trade for imperial economic gain. This severely undermined China’s economic and political sovereignty and led to widespread opium addiction throughout the country. Flash forward to 1977 and the opening of Saint Laurent’s Opium collection, which included an array of Chinese aesthetics such as exaggerated pagoda shoulders, cheongsams and the crimson Mao Jacket. Modeled after Chairman Mao, the infamous image can be connected to tumultuous events in Chinese history such as the founding of the Communist Party in China and the horrors of famine and the Cultural Revolution. For Saint Laurent, the Orient offered a lush and forbidden sensuality that made his work more daring, and provided a certain majesty of color and opulence. Problematically, however, Saint Laurent’s collection romanticizes the deadly effects of the Opium Wars on the Chinese, presenting it instead as part of the allure and sensuality of the East. Aside from the deadly effects of opium itself, the wars left a legacy of imperial subjugation and partitioned China into various regions of foreign control, subordinating dynastic control to British imperial forces. In harkening back to one of the darkest periods in Chinese history, Saint Laurent recalled a time of Western domination over China. Transporting his Western audience to a place of superiority that not only trivializes the severity of the wars and their legacy, he also constantly reminds Chinese communities that their history can simply be ignored for the sake of a larger Western aesthetic.     

This Orientalist tradition has continued into the present day with the Chinese-themed Met Gala in 2015.  The 2015 Met Gala only furthered the tradition of exotic and sensual Eastern-inspired clothing in Western fashion. Unlike Chanel and Saint Laurent, however, the Met adopted a more self-conscious Orientalist approach by purposely presenting an inauthentic view of the East. The museum explicitly states that the 2015 exhibition, China: Through the Looking Glass, “explores the impact of Chinese aesthetics on Western fashion and how China has fueled the fashionable imagination for centuries.”  In other words, the exhibition was designed to show how Western designers have been influenced by Chinese culture and to explore a Western perception of China. It showcases a dazzling display of chinoiserie, silk, palettes of red and gold, dragons, phoenixes, pagodas, mandarin collars, frog buttons and the cheongsam and qipao dresses as a way to “introduce a misreading from the start,” as head curator Andrew Bolton calls it. 

However, the exhibition ultimately paints this lost-in-translation, cross-cultural understanding as positive, dehistoricizing and depoliticizing the very real place that these aesthetics come from. The exhibition shows Vivienne Tam’s iconic screen-printed Mao Dress which features a colorful checkerboard design depicting Mao in various masquerades: in pigtails, as a priest, in sunglasses and with a bee on his nose. 

With this, many people, like art historian Rachel Silberstein, criticize how the Met simply glosses over historical and political context of such important pieces.  The exhibition doesn’t explain the way in which Tam’s Warhol-esque manipulation of Mao reflects Mao’s manipulation of his own cult of personality, dismissing Tam’s use of clothing to address ideas of personal expression versus the restrictive political ideology during Mao’s turbulent Cultural Revolution. The idea of the Mao Dress has been translated to the Mao Jacket by Vivienne Westwood, who used the simplicity of the jacket to create a fashion basic of cotton poplin, and John Galliano, who elevated the plebeian look to a sophisticated style with green silk and red satin ribbon. Both draw influence from Tam’s original Mao Dress as they transform Mao’s dictatorial look into an item of self-expression. Yet, by changing the satirical message behind Tam’s original, they use the image of Mao as an aesthetic rather than a political statement. 

Excluding the political statement of Tam’s Mao Dress obscures how Western designers often appropriate Eastern imagery or aesthetics for the sake of being cutting-edge and unique. Rather than considering the negative effects of Orientalism on history, it presents an overly stylized and romanticized version of it, showing audiences that politics and history can be simply covered with the symbolic and powerful color red. Through this disconnect, the 20,000 Chinese soldiers killed in the Opium Wars, and the many more who suffered the effects, become a high-end fragrance named “Black Opium,” while the 45 million people killed under Mao’s leadership become a trendy army green jacket, effectively reducing a country, its people and its history to a fashion statement.

With this, the color red occupies a strange place in my experience as a Chinese American because it is the unifying factor in the misperceptions and reduction of Chinese history to mere aesthetic. Yet, it’s also a defining quality of my Chinese heritage and upbringing. The color red reminds me of half-hearted and often tone-deaf Chinese New Year celebrations at my predominantly white elementary school. More importantly, it instantly brings me back to festive yet tacky decorations at Chinese banquet halls, to my mom telling me to wear red on Lunar New Year for good luck and to my family’s stash of red pockets hiding behind the fortune cat on our mantlepiece.  Balancing both of these experiences is ultimately something that I’ve come to embrace as a Chinese American.