The Chinese Look: Mao a la Mode

For Western chic, this is the year of the coolie who came in from the cold. Starting last spring, when the first Chinese-inspired fashions swept Paris, European and American designers have been having a collective field day redecorating workers' uniforms and baggy pants, overblouses and quilted jackets. The style might be called Mao a la mode. Now, with the fall collections, American couturiers have gone from paddy to palace, digging deep into the treasure chest of Imperial China. Result: high-collared mandarin robes, silk jacquard jackets, sable-lined evening coats of old damask and golden-scrolled pajamas, all done up in poesies of color pirated from the Orient (see color opposite).

Why the Chinese Look? The reopening of East-West trade was a major impetus. Commune-style jackets imported from the People's Republic caught the fancy of the young in Paris two years ago as an alternative to the standard jeans and T shirts. "For the past ten years in the West, the fashion emphasis has been on 'the uniform,'' says American Designer Mary McFadden. "We had to have some resurrection of beautiful fabric and fantasy, and when you go to fantasy you must go ethnic."

This is by no means the first appearance of a Chinese look. Nor is the look exclusively Chinese; the fashion embraces ideas and accents from almost anywhere east of Suez. Designer McFadden's opulent coats are batiked and hand-painted in Java, and other items in her collection speak variously of Japan, Mongolia and the Middle East. The style, says another American designer, Jonathan Hitchcock, "includes anything Eastern--Tibetan, Persian, Indian. It is a much more primitive way of making clothes--simple and functional yet sophisticated." And versatile. Fashions like Hitchcock's side-wrapped, hip-length "Tibetan" jacket can be worn year-round. Moreover, the less extreme Chinese fashions seem unlikely to go out of style. The look, says Joan Sibley, of Sibley & Coffee, a Manhattan design firm, "is elegant and classic. It is not really a fad."

Even Paris-based Kenzo Takada, whose Chinese-inspired collection helped start fashion's current Orient Express rolling last spring, concentrated at first on supple, sensuous clothes with a low hip line. The Japanese-born Kenzo noted that his styles "had affinities with the Chinese look, so we carried on the Chinese line." Among the first U.S. designers to introduce proletarian posh was Cinnamon Wear's Britta, whose workers' drop-shouldered jackets and raincoats flopped like wet rice when they came out last year; now the firm has trouble keeping up with demand.

Today the designer who has most faithfully interpreted classic Chinese styles is a Cuban-born American: Adolfo. His fall collection is heavy on crocheted pajamas and slim, high-collared cheongsam dresses in clingy silk knits with side buttoning and frog fasteners down the front. The look, Adolfo allows, "is very sexy. It is cut to show the fanny, and if you have a little tummy, it shows that too. Men like it very much." So does the Duchess of Windsor, who was carried away by a polka-dotted sheath at an Adolfo show.

Like Adolfo, Seventh Avenue Designer Albert Capraro (TIME, March 24) believes that the Oriental look is inherently "very feminine, very flattering." His proof: slender, square-sleeved tunics and pajama tops in the colors of Chinese porcelains--mandarin blue, combinations of pink, gray and violet. American Bill Blass has his own variation of the quilted coolie jacket and long, slinky dress, but says, "What I really like is to take something typically Chinese and do it in a Scots plaid." Yet Blass does this only for his ready-to-wear line, preferring to remain faithful to silks in his couture collection (up to $5,000 an item).

Good Stuff. Like the clothes, bangles and beads range from Chinatown-cheap to Cathay-costly. Cinnabar bead necklaces with cloisonne pendants, made by M. & J. Savitt's in Manhattan, sell for up to $285. Plastic imitations go for as little as $15. Kenneth Lane's costume-jewelry collection features boodles of glass beads, worn in long, elaborate necklaces. Other accouterments, such as coolie hats and sea-grass bags, are more for fun than fashion.

The face atop the chinoiserie should be, of course, inscrutable--also fragile, round and pallid, with pouty lips and almond eyes. The Anna May Wong hairdo has returned as the "China Doll." Louis, of Manhattan's Louis-Guy D Salon, which is doing 40 China cuts a day, predicts that the chop will be selling like suey just about everywhere within six months.

Any fashion can go too far. Not every man wants--or can afford--a Dragon Lady. In practice, few women will try to look Chinese above the neck. The clothes themselves can be bought quite cheaply. The California firm of Tea Shirts has a line of $40 cotton over blouses with embroidered appliques cut from old Chinese tablecloths. Blouses, Happy coats and sad-sack pants are moderately priced in most Chinatowns. Non-Sinologists should be cautious, however. On the Star Ferry in Hong Kong, Author Dennis Bloodworth relates, he and his Chinese wife Ping once observed a young English girl in a smart cotton dress decorated with a string of Chinese characters. The girl, noted Ping, must have found the fabric hanging in the window of some small store. "There's nothing very odd about that," replied Bloodworth. "No," said Ping. "Except, you see, the characters say, 'Good stuff inside; price cheap.'"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.