Abstract
ABSTRACT This article studies the popular fashion and everyday dress culture of the 1980s, China’s transitional period from planned economy to market economy. Drawing from film representations, fashion magazines, and media reports, I treat popular fashion as the meeting place of individual desire and social conditions, as a process of subject formation in constant negotiation with social demands and confinements. I argue that the salient imitative nature of 80s fashion reinforced individual’s connection with the collective, and such connection was often measured against localized imaginations of cosmopolitanism. The shift of focus from labor work to the cultivation of the mind, from production to life and consumption in popular culture and official discourse helped to justify the pursuit of beauty under the name of “Beautification of Life.” But the criteria of beauty in everyday dress was largely conditioned by a temporalized world order which valued the foreign (yang) as more advanced than the local (tu).
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