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BuYun Chen, Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China, University of Washington Press, 2019. 272 pgs.

Although the name “Silk Road” is a fairly modern invention, the importance of silk and the trade route to the West from China is difficult to overstate. BuYun Chen’s Empire of Style is a modest volume that explores the role of silk and apparel under the Tang dynasty. The role of silk is complicated. It had a role as a tax payment, a funding mechanism, a proxy for social commentary and as a demonstration of technical progress.

Following an introduction that focuses on defining fashion and how this applies to the Tang, Chapter 1 places silk in the context of Tang history, noting its dual role as form of tax paid by Tang subjects and as commodity to fund far-flung military outposts. Chapter 2 turns to look at Tang sumptuary regulations and the role of fashion and dress relative to such regulations. Chapter 3 is an analysis of Tang painting and art to discern fashion as represented in art and how this changed over time. Chapter 4 looks at the technical side of silk weaving and the changes wrought by technology through the Tang. Chapter 5 returns to the topics of chapter 2 in looking at how contemporary Tang writers viewed fashion and dress in Tang society.

All of this is laid out in a brief 189 pages. As the breadth indicated by the summary above suggests, any one of these chapters could be expanded to a book length work in its own right.

The key question posed in the introduction is of dress and fashion. In the present era, a man or woman in a suit or a uniform or a white lab coat is dressed to communicate position, role, and power. Go back 1300 years to the Tang and, as Chen illustrates, dress was used in the same way to communicate position and power. Moreover, Chen argues that fashion was often employed by the wearer to assert a position of equality or at least rivalry with others. Thus, the enactment of sumptuary laws intended to maintain order in society and prevent those with money from suggesting an equality with those of learning and or power.

Empire of Style is confronted by two critical challenges. The first is that fashion, and by extension silk and the silk trade, touches on a great many aspects of the Tang. There are questions of weaving technology, trade, tax, court dress, and fashion. The second challenge is a scarcity of sources. There exist few if any accounts by those who wore clothes of what they thought they were doing and why when wearing them. Of necessity the story of Tang fashion is told through items, such as clothing preserved from the era, funerary objects, and paintings. Yet, what these mean as fashion is largely a function of our interpretation of them.

The starting point is to define what fashion is and, as well, what drove its development.

Chen’s initial step to define fashion is to negate fashion as she sees it defined by historians of Western Europe. Their view, she writes, is “…rooted in this Eurocentric formulation of fashion as a register of modernity, generated by the forces of industrial capital”. (5) Clearly, this definition of fashion poses some significant problems, not least of which is that industrial capital did not emerge until the late 19th Century and thus this definition precludes as “fashion” anything occurring earlier. This definition would rule out the idea of Tang fashion from the 8th century. Indeed, it seems obvious that industrial capitalism was not a prerequisite to fashion, as evidenced by Elizabethan neck ruffs, beaver hats or Japanese woodblock print books of textile print patterns.

As an alternate theory of fashion, Chen proposes the concept of “aesthetic play”, which she derives from the work of Friedrich Schiller and Hans-Georg Gadamer. (10, note 12) Chen says of Schiller that “…aesthetic play or the play drive reconciles the sensory drive with the formal drive and allowed for self-realisation”. (9)

Continuing, now in regard to the Tang, she writes, “The practices of fashion in the Tang were forms of aesthetic play, through which sensual desires were reconciled with formal social structures and mediated by perception and sensory experiences of the body”. (9-10)

Unfortunately, this theory of Tang fashion creates a significant challenge. To prove this role of fashion in the Tang, it is necessary to define, in the context of the Tang, the “play drive”, “sensory drive”, and “formal drive”, as well as showing how through fashion Tang men and women found self-realisation in what they wore. Moreover, a definition of the “sensual desires” of Tang men and women as well as the “formal social structures” and the “sensory experiences of the body”, together with how the same were reconciled and mediated as outlined, is needed.

Put simply, this is a big ask. To show, as she does, that textile production became more complicated and designs more intricate is insufficient to demonstrate that the people of the Tang experienced self-realisation through these developments or how such textiles created “sensory experiences of the body”.

A further complication inherent in this theory is how to reconcile the thinking of the wearer and the maker of the clothes. As defined, fashion is used by the wearer for self-realisation, but clearly what can be worn is constrained by what is capable of being produced. The individual has agency but needs the assistance of the producers.

Chen notes as much, “…such marvellous deigns could not have taken place without the skill of the weaver and the availability of technical equipment.” (141) There is an iterative process at work between consumers of fashion and producers, but sadly there are almost no sources to document how this worked.

Just how complex all this can become is shown in the story of a child’s coat (Figure 4.7). The outer layer and lining are both woven in a pattern. The outer (shell) layer is multi-coloured while the inner one is monochromatic. Both Chen and the Cleveland Museum of Art, which owns the coat, are in agreement that the lining fabric was made in China. However, Chen suggests that the shell fabric was made in Tibet, while the Cleveland Museum of Art attributes the shell fabric to Sogdia in modern-day Uzbekistan. But both are in agreement that the coat was intended for a Tibetan prince and was found in Tibet.

Set aside for the moment the question of how a coat for a Tibetan prince made of either Sogdian or Tibetan fabric is relevant to Tang court fashion. If we accept that the garment was tailored in Tibet, since that was where the wearer was, and the Cleveland Museum attribution of the shell fabric as Sogdian, it appears that a fabric woven in Sogdia travelled some 1500 miles, as the crow flies, from Sogdia to Tibet. Similarly, the lining fabric woven in China perhaps in the vicinity of the capital Kaifeng also travelled to Tibet, again about 1500 miles.

In our present era when there is so much conversation about supply chains, the chain that delivered these materials to Tibet is fascinating. However, an open question is where did the silk come from to weave the Sogdian shell fabric? If China, as seems likely, the silk would have travelled half the Silk Road, about 2,600 miles to get to Sogdia to be dyed and woven before travelling back to Tibet as finished cloth. Taking Chen’s point of the iterative nature of textile development as valid, the example of this coat suggests that communications on pattern design as well as materials supply was operating over vast distances.

From this example it is clear that the Tang reputation as a “cosmopolitan empire” is well deserved.

Empire of Style is far too brief to get into the details of this trade. Rather, each chapter seems to tantalise with questions deserving of further study and research. Perhaps more to the point, nothing in the logistics or technology of the coat, as intriguing as both are, speak to the questions raised in the Introduction of how the wearer saw the coat addressing the “play drive” or the “sensory drive”.

Yet, despite these limitations, Empire of Style is fascinating. While many histories take such a high-level view that one is left wonder just how things happened, the book seeks to take us to a level where we approach the detail of everyday life. While it may not have answers, Empire of Style frames questions that should be answered for us to understand the Tang world.

How to cite: Maire, Stephen. “Tantalising with Questions: BuYun Chen’s Empire of Style.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 14 Apr. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/04/14/empire-of-style.

Stephen Maire worked in sourcing and manufacturing mostly of garments for some 28 years in Asia. He has lived and worked in Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Thailand. Upon retirement, he returned to the US and currently lives in New England.

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