Styles for Asian backgrounds

[Gene]

"Drunken Angel" is another Kurosawa film that really shows some great Western influence on clothing of the time in Postwar Japan.

 

[Shangas]

This is my family, ca. 1952. Batu Pahat, Malaysia.

At the back is my uncle. In the front are my grandmother and grandfather.

The little boy on the right is my dad.

 

[Edward]

Just for clarification, mate, you're speaking of East Asia, correct? After all, Asia is a huge continent...

Heh, very true.... one thing I have noticed in recent years is that if you say "Asian" to an American, they think South East Asian - China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, etc. If you say "Asian" to an English, they're much more likely to think India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc. Not entirely sure for why this cultural difference occurs... Unless it has something to do with Empire, colonies and wars, and the parts of Asia with which the US / UK has more familiarity that way?

Many of the Indian political elite were English educated and heavily influenced by British culture and styles. My favorite example is Jinnah the founder of Pakistan. Classic British 1930-40s style complete with monocle!:

I adore those shoes! Ghandi would be another example, too. Educated at Oxford, he dressed this way too for some time. He only adopted more traditional dress at a later stage, when he became a political figurehead.

Shanghai, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore were very popular tourist hotspots in the golden era (especially Shanghai and Singapore). So the stream of Western influence would've been steady and strong for several decades.

Presumably also it would only have been the very wealthy who could have afforded to travel there, which also would tell us something about the styles that would have been influential. (Also there would have been sailors and the like, but less likely I think were they to have been fashion-influencers?).

Chasseur's suggestion of movies is a good one. Here are a few more...

Shanghai - "Shanghai" (set in Shanghai in 1941, months before the invasion of the Settlement), "The Painted Veil" (partially set in 1920s Shanghai).

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom starts in Shanghai in 1935.



Singapore - The TV series "Tenko", about the Japanese occupation of the Malay Peninsula and Singapore in the 1940s.

As I recall, Temple... is meant to have been fairly authentic in its depiction of a particular strata of expat culture in mid 30s Shanghai. I also recall the third Mummy film, set in China, doing Shanghai expat culture rather well, especially evening dress.

My own limited knowledge of the history of that party of the world suggests that at that point in time those cultures were just beginning to make the swtich from traditional to Western-influenced clothing, with the result that for many day to day wear might have been more Western, whereas formal occasions were more traditional. Of course, you also would need to distinguish trends in the swinging, cosmopolitan cities and the rural areas where they had never seen a lao wai.

It's interesting that the men are wearing Western clothing but the women are wearing Japanese clothes.

I've seen that elsewhere too, right up to the present day. It seems that men do, for all the reasons suggested above, and perhaps others, Westernise much more rapidly in terms of clothing. When I visited Bangalore, round the University campus all the students and staff were very Westernised. Downtown, it tended to be that the women were much more traditional while the men were Westernised. I live in a very ethnically mixed part of London, and I see it here too. Among the Bangladeshi community, many of the women still dress traditionally while their menfolk are entirely Westernised, special occasions such as weddings aside. You can actually see the change across different generations of families, moreso in the girls. A first generation immigrant will still dress as might have been the norm in the old country some decades ago, while her granddaughter, English by birth and by culture, will be dressed no differently to her peers of any ethnicity. The only significant exception here would be clothing worn for a religious reason; you'll see a fair few hijabs around (and even those are influenced by the West in terms of logos, fabric patterns and so on - absolutely fascinating).

 

[Shangas]

Presumably also it would only have been the very wealthy who could have afforded to travel there, which also would tell us something about the styles that would have been influential. (Also there would have been sailors and the like, but less likely I think were they to have been fashion-influencers?).

The wealthy/well-to-do, mostly. So the upperclass/aristocracy/nobility and the well-to-do. Or alternatively, people whose jobs would take them to Shanghai or Singapore. So, soldiers, company officials/representatives, diplomats, journalists and so-forth. Don't forget, from England to Shanghai took about five or more weeks by ship, going around Spain, through the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, out into the Pacific and then along (what was the spelt as) the Whangpoo River to Shanghai.

In that trip, you might stop in Italy, Egypt, India, Singapore, Saigon and Hong Kong. To pick up and drop off passengers, mail, cargo and also to revittle and recoal the ship. You might stop overnight or for a day or two in each location, depending on the business to be done. Perhaps if the ship had to be refuelled, you might stay overnight. Or if it was just a quick mailstop, then it was just an afternoon. Add it all together, it could take a month or two to get to Shanghai. In the 1920s and 30s, that was a VERY long journey. If you were going, you had to be pretty rich, because for damn sure, the steamship tickets were not cheap.

Even going from America took a long time. If you left from the East Coast, it could take probably two months. Crossing the Atlantic took a week in the fastest ships...it still does today. And then add the four or five weeks from Gibraltar to Shanghai, plus coaling stops...it was a long voyage. Even if you left from say, San Francisco, and travelled west, it would take a week or two.

And when you went to these far-flung places, you didn't go for a week and then go home. You didn't travel for two months for nothing. Once you were there, you went shopping. Touring. Sightseeing. You stayed at Raffles. At the Palace. At the Cathay. The Hotel de l'Europe. The Hotel Continental. All the most expensive places in town. You went to Nanking Road, you went to Orchard Road. You bought eastern curiosities, new clothes, trinkets. You would stay for weeks and months. You might even choose to just LIVE there and not go home for years - a lot of people did. You spent your nights at the big nightclubs or at the hotel ballrooms such as the Cassanova. The Paramount Ballroom. The Raffles Ballroom. You went to the cinema. To the racetrack. You attended parties. All this required oodles of moolah.

Going to the east for a holiday was a BIG event. If you went, you surely needed a lot of money. Or saved up a lot for a long family holiday. So I expect that the people in the Eastern countries with significant Western exposure, would've been seeing only the very BEST of Western styles and fashions in the Golden Era.

--- ---- ----

That said, let's look at this from the other side.

China is a MASSIVE country. And in many respects, it was still very backwards. I'm being honest here. Unless you were born into money or made your way into money, and lived in an urban center such as Shanghai or (what was then) Peking or (what was then) Nanking, you were, more likely as not, a rice-growing, crop-harvesting peasant living in the countryside. Your chances of seeing western-style clothes (or anything western, for that matter), would've been very slim. Most likely, you wouldn't know how to read OR write. In Chinese or English.

In British Malaya and Singapore, as much as the British did for these countries, bringing Western-style politics, management, society, clothing and technology in, it affected very few people on a whole. My uncle grew up in Singapore in the 1930s and 40s. He was lucky in that regard, but it still wasn't as modern or as clean as we'd like to think. And when the Japanese invaded, it was like going back to the Dark Ages. No electric lights. Oil lamps. No running water. No telegraph or telephone-lines...But I digress.

It's important to look at this from both perspectives. What the Westerners would've seen and what the Easterners would've seen. Yes, the Easterners would've seen Western attire. But what percentage? Only the wealthy Chinese or Orientals who were well-established in big trading-centers and port-cities. Not those farming in the country.

And what kinds of Westerners would've been in the Far East at the time? Only those who could really afford to make it worthwhile.

 

[Fifty150]

Larry Ching, "The Chinese Frank Sinatra", with adoring fans, c1942.​

 

[Fifty150]

Jane Wyman, Charlie Low, Ronald Reagan 1942

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

The former site of Charlie Low's Forbidden City.
(369 Sutter St, San Francisco -- originally 363 Sutter St)

 

[Shangas]

I've heard of the Forbidden City. It was a nightclub, wasn't it?

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Yes it was and it would have been on the second floor of 363 Sutter St (now 369) where the Barbizon school is now.

 

[Propeller Planes]

Hi folks

Many thanks for all the pictures and information being posted! I've saved them all and hopefully this can assist me with trying to find a vintage style to suit me. Hopefully by then, I can share the results with you all!

 

[Shangas]

You're welcome, PP.

Feel free to post whatever questions and queries you might have.

Sadly, I feel like I should be able to contribute more to this thread than I have. For all her working life, my grandmother (see the photo above), was a professional tailor, from the late 1940s to the late 1970s. Roughly 30-40 years. Here is my grandfather's business-card with the name of his business, and my grandmother's shop, printed on it:

Grandpa worked at a photography studio. Grandma worked at the Kam Seng Beauty Parlour (it shared a building with her tailor's shop. 'Kam Seng' is Cantonese. It means 'Golden Star').

This is the same grandmother last year, a couple of months before she died. That's me next to her in the blue

I wish I had asked her more about her earlier life when I had the chance. Mostly, she taught me about the War. I guess you don't remember much else at 97.

 

[resortes805]

As a hapa, one of my major style icons coming up in the Socal swing scene was, and still is Bernard S.