Beyond the Flat Case:
Redisplaying Late Qing Chinese Clothing through Interdisciplinary, Conservation-Informed Practice
First presented as a poster at the 2025 Dress and Textile Specialists (DATS) Conference at the University of Brighton. Find the poster Bibliography and more info (including pictures we couldn’t fit onto the poster) here!
Authors:
Laurence Wen-Yu Li (laurence.li@rca.ac.uk)
and
Viviane Wei-An Chen of Viviane Chen Studio (contact@vivianechen.co.uk)
Cite the DATS poster as: Li, Laurence Wen-Yu and Chen, Viviane Wei-An. “Beyond the Flat Case: Redisplaying Late Qing Chinese Clothing through Interdisciplinary, Conservation-Informed Practice.” Poster presented at the Dress and Textiles Specialists 50th Anniversary Conference, University of Brighton, United Kingdom, 25 September 2025.
Cite this page as: Li, Laurence Wen-Yu. “Beyond the Flat Case”. laurencewenyuli.com. Published 22 Sep 2025. [Access date] https://www.laurencewenyuli.com/portfolio/beyond-the-flat-case
Historical Chinese and other flat-cut garments such as the Kimono are very often displayed in museums hanging flat on T-bars, as in the picture on the left (taken by Laurence at the China Silk Museum in 2024) (see also Silberstein, 2020). This is relatively cheap to install and allows the textile weaves and embellishments to shine. However, since most of these garments were supposed to be worn with a huge amount of ease, it is sometimes difficult to visualize how these garments would have looked like on a person. Therefore, it can be useful to mount these garments on three-dimensional mannequin mounts that would replicate the size of the original wearer. In our DATS poster (linked both above and below at the end of this page), we provide a new, implementable way to mount late Qing Dynasty (1840-1911) women’s garments on three-dimensional forms.
For this purpose, we have decided to use the reconstruction of a late Qing Han Chinese ensemble that Laurence constructed for her Master’s thesis, “Recreating Embodied Experiences of Late Qing Han Chinese Women’s Dress through Making and Wearing” (2023). The ensemble includes not just outerwear but also women’s undergarments. Clockwise from bottom left: ties for leggings, 膝褲 xiku (leggings that cover the footbinding bandages), 大襠褲 dadangku (plain under-trousers), folded tie for trousers, 肚兜 dudou (belly band, worn next to the skin on the torso covering the chest), 馬面裙 mamian skirt (wrap skirt of two panels with pleated sides and flat fronts and backs), and 大襟衫 dajinshan (knee-length jacket with right-opening lapel).
You may recognize this set from the documentary we did about the making process and how to dress a late Qing woman, which can be found on the Fu Jen Catholic University Chinese Textiles and Clothing Center YouTube Channel (@fjuctccc), and of course on my website here.
One of the many difficulties in making three-dimensional mounts for historical Chinese dress is a lack of information about undergarments—even though the garments may be loose, people’s bodies were still shaped by the underlayers they wore! Laurence’s research has found that we can find clues to how women’s bodies were shaped by their undergarments by not only looking at surviving undergarments in museum collections (such as the dudou in the Fu Jen Chinese Textiles and Clothing Culture Center) but also at erotic art. This Daoguang era (1821-1850) illustration shows a woman dressed in just her dudou and dadangku in the boudoir with a man.
To make the mount…
The padded mannequin
What the dudou, mamian skirt, and dajinshan look like on the Proportion mannequin before any padding was added.
What the dudou, mamian skirt, and dajinshan look like on the Proportion mannequin after padding and support garments were added to the mannequin.
Still photo of the dajinshan and mamian skirt mounted on the custom three-dimensional mount.
Still photo of Laurence wearing the dajinshan and mamian skirt.
Findings
Combining information from erotic prints, pictures of Laurence wearing the reconstructed ensemble, and demographic information containing the heights of late Qing Han women (Olds, 2003), Viviane and her team were able to pad out a stock mannequin with Western proportions to display our dajinshan and mamian skirt. This bespoke mounting allows the dajinshan and mamian skirt to hang at the correct height proportional to the body, and for the dajinshan to drape correctly over the shoulders, which are narrower and slope more steeply than most modern Western mannequins. However, we are still limited by the tools and materials available to us. For instance, you may have noticed that the mannequin head is slightly too long to be in proportion to the rest of the mannequin once it has been adjusted to the height of the ensemble. This issue has long been a concern of Viviane’s (insert link to previous paper), and is something we are committed to figuring out.
What’s next?
We’re in the process of both refining and expanding our research to develop three-dimensional mounts for more categories of historical Chinese clothing, ideally to include menswear and children’s garments, starting from the late Qing dynasty and working our way backwards. If you’d like to follow along on this endeavor please check out our social media pages for live updates!
Laurence: @laurencewenyuli on Instagram
Viviane: @vivianechen_official on Instagram
Bibliography
Chen, Viviane Wei-An. "Evaluation of Mounting Methods: Towards a Three-Dimensional Embodiment of the Imperial Manchu Robe of the Qing Dynasty (1644 – 1911)." Master of Philosophy in Textile Conservation, University of Glasgow, 2020.
Fukuda, Kazuhiko. Zhongguo chungonghua. [Erotic Arts of China]. Tokyo: Fanghe shudian, 1982.
Li, Laurence Wen-Yu. "Recreating Embodied Experiences of Late Qing Han Chinese Women’s Dress through Making and Wearing." Master’s thesis, Fu Jen Catholic University, 2023.
Olds, K. B. "The biological standard of living in Taiwan under Japanese occupation." [In eng]. Econ Hum Biol 1, no. 2 (Jun 2003): 187-206. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1570-677x(02)00030-8.
Silberstein, Rachel. A fashionable century: Textile artistry and commerce in the late Qing. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020.
Spicer, Gwen. Magnetic mounting systems for museums and cultural institutions. Delaware: Spicer Art Books, 2019. ISBN978-0-578-46017-8
Yeh, Le-Chang. "A First Glance at the phrases “belly wrap”, “undergarment covering chest and abdomen” and “tube tops” contained in Qing Dynasty's long novels with epic summaries." Praxes 13 (2019): 30-48.