A Hundred Years of Changes in China's Livelihood 20th ~ Early 21st Centuries

Through the changes in lifestyle, especially the changes in dress and culture. We can recognize the development of national cultural psychology and social consciousness.

Wearing shoes and hats, for example, is a purely personal act of life, but it has caused a great uproar in modern China, and has become the precursor to the enlightenment of a generation of forefathers and the goblet of the internationalization of lifestyles.

After the Opium War, people felt that the weakness of the country is due to the people's wisdom is not open, to start the people's wisdom, we must first get rid of the bad habits of the people's confinement, especially opium smoking, foot-binding has become the destruction of the people's body, insulting to the country's character of the two major public nuisances. The advanced intellectuals are all verbally attacked this.

The opposition to women's foot-binding and men's pigtails inevitably led to the reform of footwear and clothing. As early as during the Hundred Days' Reform, Kang Youwei wrote a petition "please prohibit women's foot-binding folding" and "please break the hair and easy to dress to change the folding", that women's foot-binding, can not work; braided hair long hanging, not conducive to the production of machines; wide clothes, long train and elegant step, not easy to compete in the era of the world, requesting to release the foot, break the hair, easy to dress in order to "the same with the European and American customs," which is a change of clothing as a study of Western civilization, and the change of clothing as an example. This is to change clothes and crown as an important content of learning Western civilization, which has the significance of opening up the people's wisdom. There were two major groups of people, those who cut their pigtails and those who kept their pigtails, from top to bottom. The main stay certainly have the upper class of the stubborn faction, and the lower class of the people, especially in the closed rural areas of the anti-cutting force is greater, although the braid is not Han Chinese attire, but has been passed for hundreds of years, by the long-term accumulation of life formed by the psychological habits have been accumulated and difficult to come back. Some for the loss of pigtails crying, cursing the mother, calling mother of all kinds, some spontaneously organized to protect the braid will protest, and even a strike. The main cut more this action as a call to support the revolution, to the eve of the Xinhai Revolution to form a climax, people rejoice in the choice of auspicious days, worship ancestors, firecrackers, cut pigtails. In some places, "braid" has also become a curse word, to say a "you really braid! "as being scolded" is not something ". The attitude towards the braid, the polar opposites of right and wrong and the rapid transformation of honor and disgrace, reflects the ups and downs of social customs in the revolutionary tide with great sensitivity.

Breaking hair and changing clothes is a custom improvement under the guidance of anti-feudal ideology, unlike the change of clothes in the past generations, the change of clothes and crowns in the history of the change of the form of the system, the unchanged is the ethical and hierarchical, the Republic of China at the beginning of the promulgation of the "uniform system" stipulates that the officials, regardless of the level of the Western-style big fashion and swallow-tailed clothes for the dress, is the complete rejection of the feudal dress hierarchy. Sun Yat-sen also put forward the idea of "suitable for hygiene, convenient for movement, suitable for economy, and strong for appearance." (7) as the guiding ideology of improved dress, this concept of clothing in China with modern civilization, the implementation of the concept of clothing, so that everyone can not be separated from the body of the clothing, completely free from the norms of feudal ethics, to the practical, economic, health, beautiful direction of development, which is an important turning point in the history of clothing.

In the clothing changes, wearing foreign clothes is a major fashion, which can not be simply attributed to the tendency to worship foreigners. The establishment of democracy has inspired people to the Western democratic society, people are fascinated by the idea of freedom and equality, the idea of natural human rights, that the way of life established by this idea represents the direction of society, the dress is a symbol of civilization, by the people's favorite. The result of social practice is that the popularity of foreign clothes in China did not replace Chinese clothes, but promoted the improvement of Chinese clothes. The emergence of Zhongshan clothes is the product of the combination of East and West. It is modeled after the Western-style clothes, changing the large lapel collar to a stand-up collar, four patch pockets, five buttons, and removing the belt. Women's clothing changed from the wide straight type of full dress, in accordance with the Western human body curves to be cut, evolved into today's cheongsam. This is along the aesthetic and values of Western-style clothing, combined with some of the traditional Chinese form and create a new style of clothing, can be called the most successful work of the Western body in the use. What to wear, what not to wear is a personal behavior, some advanced thinkers are the freedom of personal arrangement of life as an inseparable part of individual freedom, is sacrosanct personal power. The call for personalized emancipation and the development of the commodity economy stimulated people's desire to live in the dress code to pursue the new and different, reasonable, unreasonable waves of rapid tide. Suits, robes, coats, chests, backs, long leaning and short playing, new and old, soil and foreign, strange and strange, the real beginning of the era of free wear of clothing. In the drastic social changes, clothing changes in the first, sensitive to the direction of the performance of the cultural climate.